Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025)

Israel Centeno

Mario Vargas Llosa has died, and with him goes more than just a great author: an entire way of living and understanding literature comes to a close. He was, perhaps, the last Spanish-language writer to carry out an orthodox literary career—in the Flaubertian sense: rigorous, total, uncompromising—and also the last to embody, without apology, the figure of the professional writer who sought to intervene in the world through fiction and through ideas.

He was a man of his time—of that brilliant generation known as the Boom—and like them, he staked everything on the total novel. And in that wager, he went further than most. The War of the End of the World and The Green House are towering examples: expansive, ambitious, complex novels where history, myth, violence, and narrative structure converge with masterful command. Difficult novels, yes—but enduring.

He had a particular sense of humor: elegant, sometimes mischievous. He also wrote light novels, playful or satirical tales like Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. He moved with ease from highbrow eroticism to political realism, from personal testimony to critical essay. In Praise of the Stepmother is a refined, daring, and at times nearly pornographic erotic piece—yet crafted with literary skill. Along with The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, it forms an unusual diptych in our tradition.

He was also a formidable essayist, capable of thinking literature with clarity and passion. His intellectual autobiography, A Fish in the Water, is a key work: not only does it trace his vocation, but it also delves into the political crossroads he faced. Because Vargas Llosa didn’t just want to write history—he wanted to shape it. He ran for president. And thank God he didn’t win. That saved him. It saved his memory. For in Latin America, it is no easy thing to become president—and come out of it unscathed. That experience would likely have consumed even his prestige. It would have taken from him what not even his fiercest critics could: the freedom of having lived to write.

Conversation in the Cathedral remains, half a century later, the greatest political novel in the Spanish language. No other work of fiction has so thoroughly, so darkly, so lucidly captured the moral and social degradation of a Latin American society. And it goes beyond the denunciation of dictatorship: what it exposes is a deeper, stickier, more corrosive machine. The novel lays bare the workings of creole populism in full swing—clientelism, double standards, institutional cynicism. Among other things, it is a scathing portrait of APRA as a political and cultural phenomenon. The dictatorship of General Odría is merely the backdrop for a Peru debased by decades of false saviors and corrupt bargains. It is not just a great novel—it is a tour de force. One of those works that do not age, but sharpens with time.

Even in his lesser novels, there is craft—and often courage. Death in the Andes, for instance, is a dark and probing exploration of terror and moral decay.

He lived and wrote long after the death of the novel had been proclaimed—more than once. Not only did he survive that verdict: he disproved it. But it is also true that with him, the epilogue ends. The modern novel—the novel as total art, as complex architecture of language, history, and psychology—culminates in his work. What comes next—good, brilliant, legitimate—will be something else entirely.

He was one of the few fortunate writers who had it all: talent, discipline, critical acclaim, commercial success, and a secure place in literary history. He shifted registers without losing authority. And he also—this matters—lived as he pleased. He knew how to manage and enjoy his success, sometimes wisely, sometimes clumsily, but always with disarming authenticity. He was a public figure, a media personality, and even a protagonist of gossip-page episodes: from his infamous falling-out with Gabriel García Márquez—half tragedy, half legend—to his romance, marriage, and eventual divorce with Isabel Preysler, which became tabloid fodder and, at the same time, a testament to a sentimental freedom exercised without shame.

He died with the consciousness of having built a body of work that would outlive him. And that awareness—perhaps lofty—is in truth a privilege that very few modern authors can claim. History and time will confirm what many of us already know: that his work will be read a hundred years from now.

What remains is the void of his absence—but also the persistence of his example: to write as if literature could still explain everything, as if fiction could still touch the heart of what is real.

—A writer who read him, who debated him, who respected him.

And who knows that, with him, we say goodbye to literature written on paper as a platform.

Today he will not make front-page news; he hadn’t even drawn his final breath before he was replicated on hundreds of thousands of screens.