In celebration of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, we take a look this week at five of his most unforgettable characters.
AUNT JULIA (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter): “I have used many memories of Lima in the 1950s, when I was a young journalist. But what is invented in the book is much more important than what is drawn from memory.” Perhaps his best-loved work, and the one that has travelled the furthest, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, followed a young journalist’s flirtation and relationship with his glamorous, divorced aunt, a love affair that thrives despite the 32-year age gap. And “Aunt Julia” fits in with other Vargas Llosa novels that have celebrated sensuality, transgression and love, from In Praise of the Stepmother to the more recent The Bad Girl.
Interleaved with their story are scenes from TV soap operas, especially those written by the lowering, gargoyle figure of Pedro Camacho: “Was Hell the epilogue of their love? …Had this story of blood, song, mysticism and fire ended, or would it have an extraterrestrial sequel?” Aunt Julia, drawn in part — but only in part — from the real-life Julia Urquidi, Vargas Llosa’s own aunt by marriage, who became his first wife, is a beguiling character, a Latin American Holly Golightly who blends sensuality with charming, if ruthless, practicality. When Julia Urquidi wrote her own version of their relationship, which she remembered somewhat differently from Vargas Llosa, he commented: “Novels tell lies.” That, to him, is what made them so interesting.
AMBROSIO (Conversations in the Cathedral): Translated into English in 1975, Conversation in the Cathedral ranks among Vargas Llosa’s greatest works — a vast history, and critique, of Latin America’s dictatorships. The cathedral of the story is a bar, where a young, idealistic journalist, Santiago, meets his father’s former chauffeur Ambrosio. The chauffeur is now a dogcatcher; in the city, dogs are being rounded up and taken to the pound, and to earn their money, many dogcatchers have abducted not just strays but family pets.
As their conversations circle around the history of Latin America, and Manuel Odria’s long dictatorship of Peru, it is Ambrosio’s history and life that becomes far more compelling than Santiago’s well-meaning idealism.
RAFAEL TRUJILLO (Feast of the Goat): El Jefe ruled the Dominican Republic from the 1930s until his assassination, in 1961, under the slogan “God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth”. The Feast of the Goat was a triumphant return to fiction for Vargas Llosa, and one of the novels that continued his exploration of, and fascination with, the workings of power, especially in the context of Latin American history.
More From This Section
El Jefe comes into focus slowly, through the stories of others — the daughter of a man once inside Trujillo’s charmed circle, then betrayed and dismissed, a group of conspirators plotting the assassination of the dictator. In Vargas Llosa’s retelling, Trujillo emerges as both banal and terrifying, capricious in a way indicated by the “Goat” in the title, but horrifyingly compelling. The real question, for Vargas Llosa, was to explore complicity — and the motives or the indifference of those who allowed a Trujillo to thrive for so many decades.
CORPORAL LITUMA (Death in the Andes): The first novel that Vargas Llosa wrote after standing, unsuccessfully, for president, Death in the Andes is a rich, disturbing, journalistic inquiry into the heart of darkness. Three men vanish from a remote mining town in the Andes: have they become victims of Sendoro Luminoso, the guerrilla movement, or of ritual sacrifice by pishtacos, creatures of fantasy who traffic in human fat?
Corporal Lituma is a police officer, a man who holds, as best as he can, the values of civilisation while remaining aware that the world around him is either a madhouse or a slaughterhouse, possibly both. His investigation of the crime allows Vargas Llosa to analyse — and indict — Sendoro Luminoso’s brutality, and in a larger way, to arrive at the fault lines between civilisation and a more primitive human darkness. To Lituma, the disappearance of the men may just be “a resurrection of all that buried violence”; and he will have to find his own, tortured way to understanding.
THE COUNSELOR (The War of the End of the World): Antonio Conselheiro was a preacher, a pilgrim, and finally, a martyr, whose civil rebellion against the Brazilian government ended with his death in 1897 of dysentery brought on by excessive fasting. The War of the End of the World, one of Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious historical novels, took the story of the war of Canudo and Conselheiro’s crusade as its backbone.
The Counselor is a deeply enigmatic figure, in Vargas Llosa’s retelling, a man who wanders his land, gathering followers, who builds Canudos as a “tree of stories”. Was he a messiah, as many believed, or was he a madman? Vargas Llosa leaves this ambiguous, in what would be widely seen as his most powerful work — a great exploration of how a man might acquire mythical status in his lifetime.