A Remarkably Imperfect Supernova.(But a Supernova Nonetheless)

Mario Vargas Llosa: 1936-2025

Glennis Lashley, my mother, wrote about Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversations In The Cathedral for her Bachelor’s thesis in the spring of 1973. She was rapturous about his first act as a liberal boom writer, and less so about his second as the most elegant moderate-conservative in the literary world. When I started to take writing seriously, I read Feast Of The Goat, and Death in the Andes, and found a surrogate hero to process the heartbreaks of the Black Panthers and radical politics in the 20th century. His career was something we would go to on several occasions when we would talk about books, and while a good deal of my reverence for his work remains, she taught me to understand that her hesitance had almost nothing to do with his ideological shifts.

Re-reading him while under sick bay again, I understand why she told me to read the big early books before we had an extended conversation. Vargas Llosa was a Boom Writer at his core, part of group of ambitious, bright, disciplined literary men whose range scaled the globe but whose axis was around Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner; The way he used the strong man and a metaphor for a global plantation in Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversations In The Cathedral established himself as a global literary figure.

Vargas Llosa was all this until his greatest heartache as a public intellectual. For the first act of his life, he had been an eloquent Marxist and passionate defender of Fidel Castro until he confronted him on poet Herbert Padilla, who barely survived Castro's prison systems, and gay and black dissidents who did not. His shunning and excommunication from radical circles dovetailed with a broader culture that saw public failures of socialist governments for the first time in their generation. Yet, as my mother told me, Vargas Llosa didn’t leave the struggle to the abyss( like so many workers), but a global media that could make him a global star of another kind for the right. He wasn't cast off to the projects like so many civil rights working women I saw in the northwest, but presented to the world as a mixture of Immanuel Kant and John Hamn.

Where I won her over is my idea that he made the best traction of his socialist/Marxist heartbreak on the page. I even say that with a caveat: what makes Goat and Andes work is that he lets the passionate liberal inside him quarrel with the heartbroken right winger, with the liberal winning more times than not. Goat’s dissection of Trujillo showed that he hadn’t lost his beautifully acidic critique of machismo and dictatorship, Andes’ dissection of the Shining Path shows a compassion for what the military does to poor soldiers that would make many of his right-wing friends nervous. This, and his love for Madame Bovary (and any woman, real or non in her orbit) was the reason my mother held some space for him. She had grown up with American men( Baraka, Cannon, Bellow, Roth) who wanted her dead for exhibiting a whit of pushback and agency, and Vargas Llosa, a global literary man tougher than all four men combined, was someone intrigued and interested in her being in any room.

The problem as my mother would tell me, would be that Margaret Thatcher wasn’t a fascinating lady you would have dinner with at l'escargot; she was a person whose hands were on the wheels of power that killed thousands of people(especially the Vietnamese who wanted to come to London in the 80’s) That went tenfold with Ronald Regan whose foreign policy was at the levers that left the Cuban people Vargas Llosa loved with no one but Castro to receive any support. That went infinite with Henry Kissinger, who shape-shifted his political beliefs to serve power and money, who would have helped put to death the younger populist Vargas Llosa in the way he put to death such different political figures as Lumumba, Neruda, Allende, and Jara. When he became big enough to run for president of Peru, Vargas Llosa tried to win the votes of people who saw the business end of what his friends did, and lost in a way to tarnish his legacy as someone whose lack of understanding of power was almost as powerful as his rare-in-a-century skill in literary fiction.

Yet being badly out of his element isn’t hand-blood complicity; and there are times when I see BLM and non profits stealing from neighborhoods like my own and feel the best of Vargas Llosa's contrarianism in my bones. Yet I also understand that even in his most senile, he retained a biblical anti-trump hatred. Dementia and long Covid ate his brain, talent and conscious in the last years of his life in a similar way booze and heroin did Faulkner’s in the late 50’s( and like Faulkner did before his death; Vargas Llosa disavowed his previously liberal disavowals, returning to a wife he left and writing, Peru, The Thing I Owe You Is My Silence). Let the reader use that space to pick up his ( and some of the world’s) greatest works of fiction. Then let us read the best of the rest. If it is the job of a responsible intellectual to see him whole and understand what he got wrong, it is the job of a responsible liberal to grapple with what he got right. And he got a lot right

Vargas Llosa was 89 years old.

Hi mama, I see you up there.