Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer whose novels spoke of the human quest for freedom and won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010, was once a frequent visitor to Lima’s Café Haiti in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood.
So perhaps it’s little surprise that Mr. Vargas Llosa and his significance in Peru and beyond are topics circulating among Café Haiti’s breakfast crowd on April 14, two days after the great intellectual died at his Lima home.
“Vargas Llosa was a point of pride for all of us in Peru, every house of a certain educational level had at least one of his books, usually more,” says Lemer Panduro, a retired military officer having breakfast with his wife at Café Haiti.
Why We Wrote This
Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa’s experiences with military dictatorship influenced his writings – and his politics. His fellow citizens recall him as part of a wave of Latin American literary lions in the latter half of the 20th century.
“He put Peru on the world’s literary map,” he says, before adding with a twinkle in his eye: “He put us right up there with Colombia, which of course had [Gabriel] García Márquez.”
Indeed Mr. Vargas Llosa was part of an apotheosis of Andean literature in the second half of the 20th century that captured the world’s imagination.
“He was our most seminal writer of the 20th century and as such he was part of a great Andean intellectual eruption that explored the links and contradictions between our national identities and an increasing globalization,” says Rodolfo Sánchez Garrafa, a sociologist and writer of treatises on what he calls the important intellectual challenges facing Peru today.
Like others at Café Haiti, Mr. Sánchez Garrafa recalls Mr. Vargas Llosa’s entry into Peruvian politics in the 1980s – and deems “a mistake” the intellectual-to-politician transition.
“I distinguish between the global reception he received for his writings on universal ideas and inspirations, and the perspectives he promoted in his political ventures,” he says. “He didn’t succeed with a vision for Latin America and Peru.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa nearly won Peru’s 1990 presidential election before losing in a runoff to political neophyte Alberto Fujimori. A socialist early on who wrote of his admiration for Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, the author of “Death in the Andes” and “Conversation in the Cathedral” eventually alienated Latin America’s leftist intelligentsia as he shifted rightward and embraced capitalism as the answer to Peru’s (and Latin America’s) economic and security challenges.
As a military man himself, Mr. Panduro says he remembers best the short 1963 novel “The City and the Dogs,” a tale of treachery and violence inspired by Mr. Vargas Llosa’s education at a military academy. “He wrote of what he lived during the dictatorship,” he says, “and what he [describes] is a loss of humanity we can all relate to.”
Looking around Café Haiti, Mr. Sánchez Garrafa laments what he says is an absence of intellectual fervor in Peru today to equal the debate that Mr. Vargas Llosa provided.
As he shares a coffee with his friend and political commentator Julio Gilberto Muñiz Caparó, the sociologist pulls from his satchel a philosophical exploration the two men published last year. Titled in Spanish “You and Us,” the book takes up big questions such as whether an “Andean philosophy” exists and how the Andean peoples relate to the Western world.
It’s the kind of big topic that, were he to stroll into his old haunt on a busy Lima street, Mr. Vargas Llosa would no doubt be eager to discuss.
