On Mario Vargas Llosa

An admirer of the Cuban Revolution until well into his career, Nobel laureate novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa has become the most prominent exponent of classical liberalism in the Spanish-speaking world. His political migration away from the left reflects his gradual disenchantment with ideology and fanaticism, themes reflected in his great novels The War at the End of the World and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.

Intended as an introduction to this study,this is a draft of the first 73 pages of a book recently published at the University of Texas Press (2014).

A commentary and critique of Vargas Llosa's fictionalized biography of Roger Casement

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

This section is devoted to writing that does not fall within the strict definition of 'research' but that is, nevertheless, of special interest to researchers. It enables us to publish a wide variety of material on many aspects of hispanism: opinion, discussion, interviews, revaluations, arguments, anecdotes and memoirs, and impassioned calls to arms. It also offers us the opportunity of publishing our readers' responses to them. Contributions are invited, and may be of any length from a paragraph to 7,000 words.

This article considers the Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s four Amazonian novels within the context of other twentieth-century works set in the region, especially the Latin American novela de la selva, or jungle novel. Vargas Llosa’s repeated presentation of Amazonia as a verdant, virgin site of adventure, violence and injustice clearly links his work to the Latin American telluric novels of the 1920s and 1930s, despite Vargas Llosa’s proclaimed low opinion of that genre. In fact, Vargas Llosa composes a literary wilderness that reveals his fractious and long-standing relationship with the novela de la selva. By examining the Peruvian writer’s earliest journalistic publications and his novelistic production over the course of fifty years, this article shows that Vargas Llosa’s depiction of Amazonia pays a perhaps unintended homage to the jungle novel of the early twentieth century.

Hispanic Research Journal, 2006

This section is devoted to writing that does not fall within the strict definition of 'research' but that is, nevertheless, of special interest to researchers. It enables us to publish a wide variety of material on many aspects of hispanism: opinion, discussion, interviews, revaluations, arguments, anecdotes and memoirs, and impassioned calls to arms. It also offers us the opportunity of publishing our readers' responses to them. Contributions are invited, and may be of any length from a paragraph to 7,000 words.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2023

The Idea of Freedom in Vargas Llosa’s Fiction – From socialist beginnings to a liberal world view My book establishes a philosophico-literary framework for Vargas Llosa’s fiction, tracing and confirming the changes in the author’s world view and portrayal in his fiction from his socialist beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, to his pragmatism in the 1970s to mid-1980s, and lastly to his conversion to liberalism by 1987, representing a liberal and cosmopolitan world view ever since. Thereby, the Idea of Freedom, conceived in Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, will be central to understand the author’s political and historical fiction. In the first part the ‘positive’ concept of liberty will be explored in the treatment of Vargas Llosa’s early novels La ciudad y los perros and Conversación en La Catedral, based on Sartrean and the author’s own socially progressive beliefs. In the second part the author abandons ideological radicalism and introduces the critical reflection on utopia and revolution in La guerra del fin del mundo and Historia de Mayta, reinvigorating the moral teachings of Albert Camus and Karl Popper. Finally, in the third part the ‘negative’ and Berlinian concept of liberty of the individual of global society since 1990 has become the cornerstone for endowing Vargas Llosa’s newer characters in Travesuras de la nin͂a mala, El héroe discreto, and Cinco esquinas with a lasting liberal conscience, demonstrating that political, economic, and moral liberalism are all sides of the same notion of freedom in a democracy.

One of the greatest attributes of Mario Vargas Llosa's fiction writings is the complex characters which so well represent the diversity of Latin America's social and ethnic landscape. Using the voices of self-introspection, personal diaries and conversations, Vargas Llosa manages to create individuals with very different tastes, economic backgrounds and educational levels; women and men that are happy or sad; that love, hate or fear; that dream or despair.! ! With humor and satire, Vargas Llosa's stories deal with love, power, history and ideology, exploring a vast range of situations and problems that human relationships confront. Vargas Llosa's novels take the readers to Lima, Santo Domingo, Paris, Mexico, Buenos Aires and many other cities that he undoubtedly knows first hand. !