By the time he won the Literature Nobel in 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who died last year aged 89, had come to be regarded as the “Julio Iglesias of contemporary fiction”, said Nicholas Shakespeare in The Spectator.
For six decades he’d “defined headlines”: a global celebrity, owing not least to his “turbulent private life”, the winner of “numerous literary prizes” (some awarded “for mere famousness”, in the words of a critic). As Gerald Martin puts it in this biography, Llosa was a “literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior” in one.
Politically, he had shifted from communist student to “reverential supporter of Thatcher and Reagan” – and come close to Peru’s presidency. Personally, he was an iron-willed, selfish man motivated by resentment and revenge.
It all began with “a whopping lie”, said Maya Jaggi in The New Statesman. Born in 1936, the Nobel laureate spent his first 10 years living with his mother and her snobby family, believing that his father, a merchant seaman, was dead; then, aged 11, he was told that his father was not only alive, but coming to live with them.
Ernesto Vargas proved to be a tyrant who beat his “spoiled son”. Thus, as Martin puts it, “10 ostensibly idyllic years without a father” were followed by 10 brutal years with one. His subsequent experiences – at a cadet school in Lima, a spell as a reporter on a crime beat – would feed his “brilliant early novels”; later, his decision to elope, aged 19, with his uncle’s sister-in-law inspired his 1977 novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter”. Portrayed here as a cynical love rat, he dumped Julia to marry his cousin Patricia, 10 years his junior and “practically his sister”.
Martin believes that his “sadistic and often pornographic” fantasies about his “Lima Lolita” fuelled his 1966 novel “The Green House”. Fifty years on, he abruptly left Patricia for the socialite Isabel Preysler (Iglesias’ ex).
Martin – also the biographer of Gabriel García Márquez, with whom Llosa spectacularly fell out – has written a “genuinely critical life”, said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. He “restores the women whom Llosa reduced to literary raw material”, and argues the writer was never really a socialist, so much as beguiled by a socialist he met at college (Lea Barba).
The book has flaws, said Ian Thomson in Literary Review. There are too many exclamation marks and the writing “can be breathy”. Still, it is a “considerable achievement”: “gossipy, erudite and deeply researched”, it will be the “last word on the man who wanted to be the most famous writer in the Hispanic world since Cervantes”.