Viejo Gringo Reports #2: The Left Writes

 Casa Museo Mario Vargas-Llhosa - Arequipa, Peru

Mario Vargas-Llhosa is a contradictory figure.  His early life led him to the bohemian world of Paris, meeting leftists like Sartre, Picasso and others, posing at Marx’s grave in Highgate, meeting Trotskyist campesino leader Hugo Blanco.  The Cuban arrest of a poet in 1971 pushed him to the right, while prior to that he had been supportive of the Cuban revolution. At that time he made a public denunciation of Castro’s methods. At the museum, he is later depicted meeting vile representatives of the political class like Kissinger, Thatcher and others. He once ran for Peruvian president on a center-right ‘liberal’ ticket against Fujimori and lost big-time, giving up direct politics after that. 

Vargas-Llosa broke over the repression in Cuba of a poet, Padilla, and repression in other so-called state ‘socialist’ countries because, as a writer like him, freedom of the press was his central political concern. This follows a familiar pattern where bureaucratic repression pushes former leftists rightward or towards liberalism, not towards political revolution and revolutionary Marxism.  He went further to the right as he aged, endorsing people like Bolsonaro in Brazil and wailing about why leftist dictators weren’t being arrested along with Pinochet.  His hidden wealth came up in both the Pandora and Panama papers. 

My take on this is that his middle-class male up-bringing led him to finally embrace the comfortable life and accolades of the ruling class, along with its cash.  Yet as he once said, “I am a better writer than a politician.”  Yes he was.  The Nobel Committee gave him the award because of: "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."  Most of his famous writing was completely oppositional and deeply embedded in leftish social reality, not magical reality. It did not conform to his later politics.

This is a magnificent museum, even if you don’t speak much Spanish.  It is his former home in Arequipa, a 3 story work of mahogany, hallways and rooms. At the back a theater was built, with a viewpoint of the volcanoes that surround the city. He was born in Arequipa, then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia with his mother where he grew up. Then he was moved to Lima where he enrolled in military school at 14, at the suggestion of his father.  He graduated and went to the National University of San Marcos in Lima where he became a member of a communist organization to the left of the popular left-nationalist APRA. As a student he studied communism deeply.  After graduation he worked as a reporter, then moved to Paris where he began writing books. 

Vargas-Llosa’s first major work was “A Time for a Hero,” about the repressive nature of the Peruvian military, probably from his time as a cadet - and was banned by the government.  The second was “Casa Verde.”  It was made into a film about a brothel which is attacked by angry Catholic women led by a priest.  In the film clip I saw the ‘green’ house is burned down, a woman prostitute beaten to death, a baby nearly incinerated.  It is a depiction of religious intolerance. This novel started his career with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others as part of the Latin American writing ‘boom.’  

The first display in the museum is of Vargas-Llosa’s ‘escritorio’ – his study with books, a radio and his desk, where his ghostly presence welcomes the visitor.  The museum itself is full of a film or two in each display room.  One depicts the sounds of his birth in his bedroom.  Others are a train car that depicts his romances, a nightclub, a street in Barcelona where he lived and wrote for a time, a Parisian café where he hob-nobbed with the literati, a military barracks, a newspaper office, a bar, a movie set and finally, his acceptance of the Nobel in 2010.  It suddenly dawned on me that some of his books were turned into pulpy movies, so a Latin America public would see him not just as a writer or failed politician, but like leftie B. Traven’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” a movie person.  3 families with children were on the tour with me and that might have been part of the draw.    

Vargas-Llosa’s third major novel, “Conversations in the Cathedral” is about a Peruvian dictatorship.  “War at the End of the World” is about an massive anarchist insurrection in northern Brazil, one of his best.  Another is “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” about an insurrection in Peru. “Death in the Andes” followed about a slaughter of journalists in the mountains; “Feast of the Goat” about the Dominican dictatorship of Trujillo; “Dream of the Celt” about colonialism in Brazil and the Congo and “Harsh Times” about the  Guatemalan coup against Arbenz.

The museum popularizes Vargas-Llosa for a general public.  He wrote between 60-75 stories, critiques, non-fiction works, plays and books overall by my crude count of those in the museum’s final glass case.  Some of them were pulpy or humorous, like the Peruvian army hiring prostitutes for its soldiers in “Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.”  The films and ‘sets’ make the museum alive, along with the guide, not just plaques, text and pictures stuck to walls - although there are plenty of those too in the last segment.  The museum makes clear he was inspired by writers like Faulkner, Proust, Hemingway, Joyce, Flaubert and Borges.  In one poster, he is announced as giving a lecture on Joyce, so his life extended into the academy as a working writer.

Vargas-Llosa died only a month ago, April 13, 2025, at the age of 89.   

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Llosa,” “Peru,” “Harsh Times,” “Dream of the Celt.”

Kultur Kommissar / May 17, 2025