Tribute: The art and politics of Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Question for the Trump Era

The Nobel Prize–winning novelist, who died this week, traveled through both literature and politics with a heedlessness you had to admire.

The Great Neoliberal Novelist

In a controversial 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the late literary critic Frederic Jameson argued that while the literature of the industrialized West had largely retreated from its political vocation, that wasn’t true of the great writers of the developing world. “Third-world texts,” Jameson wrote, “even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic, necessarily p…

In his long and influential life, the most important writer in the history of Peru went from Marxism to liberalism, from Fidel Castro to Javier Milei

Vargas Llosa made a 180-degree political journey in which he was not accompanied by the rest of the generation of the Latin American literary boom, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar or Carlos Fuentes, among others.Mario Vargas Llosa, the last great exponent of the 'Latin American boom' From militant communist to neoliberal vanguard; from staunch enemy of fujimorism to support Keiko Fujimori. Politics crossed and occupied the life of…

EFE From militant communist to the vanguard of neoliberalism, from staunch enemy of Fujimorism to supporter of Keiko Fujimori. Politics permeated and occupied the life of Mario Vargas Llosa, who tried to become president of Peru, endured political persecution, and always had the future of Latin America in his thoughts. He made it clear in 1967: “In ten, twenty, or fifty years, the hour of social justice will have arrived in all our countries, as…

Tribute: The art and politics of Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa, a prominent author of the Latin American Boom, evolved politically from a socialist ally of Castro to a supporter of neoliberalism.