Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Perus second largest city. During his childhood
in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Piura, a city in the north of Peru, he believed that his father had died.
However, this was a lie told by his mother to conceal their tortuous separation. The truth emerged
when, in 1946, his father appeared unexpectedly to take him away from his mothers parents,
moving with him and his mother to Lima. This revelation signified an abrupt change in Vargas
Llosas life, from the pampered upbringing of a feminine environment to the hostile treatment of an
authoritarian father. At his side, he was to discover fear, injustice and violence for the first time.
During these years in which he left his childhood behind, devouring the works of Dumas and Victor
Hugo, the political climate in Peru was a reflection of Vargas Llosas home life. The dictator Manuel
Odra rose to power in 1948 and over the next eight years, while Vargas Llosa studied law and
literature at the University of San Marcos, he imposed rigid controls on social life which stifled
individuality, engendering scepticism, defeatism and frustration among Peruvians. This period later
inspired his novel Conversation in the Cathedral, published in 1969.
The dominant presence of authoritarianism in both public and private spheres led Vargas Llosa to
strongly condemn systems which, in one way or another, sought to inhibit individual initiative and
restrict personal freedom. His literary works, starting with The Time of the Hero (1963) one of the
key novels which pioneered the 'Boom' period in Latin American literature reflect his loathing of
arbitrary manifestations of power and the absence of law which enables the strongest to impose
their will. The inspiration for this novel was the time he spent between 1950 and 1951 in the Leoncio
Prado Military Academy, where he was sent by his father to stifle his literary ambitions through
military discipline. However, Vargas Llosa managed to rebel against his paternal yoke, not only
pursuing a writing career, but also marrying his maternal uncles sister-in-law Julia Urquidi, who was
eleven years older than him and divorced. He drew on these experiences to write his novel Aunt
Julia and the Scriptwriter, published in 1977.
Another fundamental experience in his life was a journey he made in the Amazon jungle in 1958,
which inspired novels such as The Green House(1966), Captain Pantoja and the Special
Service (1973), The Storyteller (1987) and The Dream of the Celt (2010). As opposed to other city
dwellers who first came into contact with the remote jungle landscapes of Peru, which are still
inhabited by primitive indigenous tribes, Vargas Llosa found neither exoticism nor harmony between
humanity and nature but rather despotism, violence and cruelty. The absence of law and institutions
exposed the jungle natives to the worst humiliations and acts of injustice by colonists, missionaries
and adventurers, who had come to impose their will through the use of terror and force. What he
heard, saw and felt in the jungle convinced Vargas Llosa that the archaic Peru which survived in the
depths of the Amazon and the peaks of the Andes should be integrated into a modern Peru, the
only Peru which, due to its legal framework, could stop the pillaging and wrongful acts committed
against minorities and the most vulnerable sectors of Peruvian society.