Mario Vargas Llosa, last of ‘El Boom’ novelists, dies at 89

Mario Vargas Llosa became a writer out of love. He also became a writer out of spite.

There was his early passion for literature, which led him, as a boy, to spend hours poring over adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne. And there was the bristling antipathy he felt toward his authoritarian father. “To write poems was another of the secret ways of resisting my father,” he would later say in his memoir, “since I knew how much it irritated him that I wrote verses, something he associated with eccentricity, bohemia, and what could horrify him most: being queer.”

In the early ’50s, Vargas Llosa’s father dispatched him to the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, a military school in Lima, because he thought it would “cure” the boy of his interest in literature. Instead, the young Mario embraced it further, producing novelitas — little novels — to entertain his fellow cadets, and running a small enterprise that consisted of writing love letters in exchange for cigarettes.

“It was an extremely traumatic experience which in many ways marked the end of my childhood,” Vargas Llosa told the Paris Review decades later of his military school experience, “the rediscovery of my country as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition and caught up in sometimes ferocious battle.”

The school, however, provided Vargas Llosa with the setting for his first novel: “La ciudad y los perros,” known in English as “The Time of the Hero,” published in 1963, when the author was 27. Stark and unsparing, it is told through shifting perspectives and in non-linear fashion, depicting a brutal world of hazing, murder and abuse of power at a military school that serves as a microcosm of an embattled Peru.

Trapped at the center of the action is a character that bears more than a passing resemblance to the author: an emotionally unmoored upper-class kid who goes by the nickname El poeta — the Poet. Outside of military school, the Poet grapples with a family life that has been ruptured by the ways of a despotic father; within it, he survives the academy’s violent cliques by entertaining his fellow cadets with pornographic novelitas.

“The Time of the Hero” helped to usher in El Boom Latinoamericano, the ’60s-era literary movement that had a seismic effect on literature internationally. In The Times in 1966, critic Irwin Gold described it as an “impressive first novel” that “is an often fascinating look at a country more familiar to the North American reader in its historical and legendary past than its 20th century identity.”

Officials at the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado were less impressed. Incensed by the portrayal of the school, they staged a mass burning of the book. Vargas Llosa was unbowed. “Novels aren’t written to recount life,” he stated in an essay in the New York Times many years later, “but to transform it by adding something to it.”

Vargas Llosa, a writer whose towering literary career included the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 and whose role as a public intellectual and political commentator prompted a failed bid for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, has died at 89, his son Álvaro said Sunday.

“It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,” read a letter signed by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana and posted by Álvaro on X.

Vargas Llosa was the last of the Boom novelists, who included Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, José Donoso of Chile, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. These writers did not adhere to a singular style, and their aesthetic contexts couldn’t have been more diverse. But, collectively, they took the Spanish-language literature of the Americas in a more avant-garde direction — away from the rural romanticism of the 19th century, toward a more modern deployment of language. Their works, often infused with the surreal, scrambled concepts of linear time, provided an unblinking examination of the Latin American condition.

“The impact of these writers was immediate and overwhelming,” wrote British literary critic Gerald Martin in a 1984 essay. “For the first time Latin American authors saw their novels published in large quantities.” This catapulted the Boom writers onto the world stage, transforming them into household names throughout Latin America, “like film or pop stars, sportsmen or politicians.”

Vargas Llosa’s air of debonair intellectual only added to the package: a writer for the New Statesman once described him as “tall, good-looking and with the social graces of the Latin American elite.”

Following “The Time of the Hero,” Vargas Llosa produced other well-received novels. This included “The Green House” in 1966, capturing the intersecting social currents around a bordello in a northern Peruvian town; “Conversations in the Cathedral” (1969), a fictional examination of Peruvian politics under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría in the 1950s; and the historical epic “The War of the End of the World” (1981), about an obscure uprising in 19th century Brazil.

In 1984, he published “La historia de Mayta,” translated as “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” in English, a meta novel that consists of a story about a story: A writer (a stand-in for Vargas Llosa) tries to understand the revolutionary zeal of a former classmate in a near-future Peru racked by invasion.

Times critic Richard Eder commended Vargas Llosa’s “clear eye” and sense of irony. A critic for the Independent Review hailed it as “a literary tour de force.”

His public profile heightened, Vargas Llosa became increasingly involved in politics as the 1980s wore on.

If in the 1960s, like many other Latin American writers, he had leaned left — swept up by a bohemian enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution — by the 1970s he began to move to the right, disillusioned by Castro’s authoritarian tendencies and his treatment of prominent writers.

The roots of his presidential campaign date to 1987, when amid a spiraling economic crisis, the Peruvian government proposed nationalizing banks. Vargas Llosa protested the move vigorously and ultimately established a political party, Movimiento Libertad, that was driven by free-market ideals. For the 1989 presidential election, Movimiento, in union with other right-wing and center-right parties, presented Vargas Llosa as its candidate.

Running in a crowded field, Vargas Llosa emerged as a favorite in early polls, which catapulted him to a runoff against agronomist Alberto Fujimori in 1990. But the characteristics that made him a compelling intellectual made for an uncomfortable politician. Nuance did not make for a compelling stump speech, and Vargas Llosa had little appetite for crowds. “I had to accomplish miracles,” he later wrote, “to conceal my dislike for that semihysterical pushing and pulling, kissing, pinching and pawing.”

Moreover, his staunch defense of the free market put him at odds with ordinary Peruvians, who were reeling from the country’s economic crisis and a burgeoning civil conflict. Vargas Llosa’s social position — as part of the well-to-do, fair-skinned, Spanish-speaking elite — also raised questions about how he would govern a country made up largely of Indigenous people and mixed-race mestizos.

“It wasn’t just the candidate’s great distance from the destitute masses of his native country that turned out to be a fatal problem,” wrote journalist Alma Guillermoprieto in an analysis that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1994. “It was his closeness to the people those masses most loathed: the politicians and business class.”

Vargas Llosa lost 62% to 38%. In June of 1990, he left Peru, vowing to “abstain” from electoral politics.

From then on, his involvement in politics consisted of commentary. And, in fact, his post-election memoir, “Un pez en el agua” (“A Fish in the Water”), published in 1993, offered some lucid observations about what the country faced under Fujimori. “With just a slight touch of makeup,” he noted, Fujimori’s regime had returned to a “very old Latin American tradition: that of caudillos, that of military power over civilian society, that of force and the intrigues of a coterie over institutions and the law.”

In 1992, Fujimori, seized additional power via an autogolpe — a self-coup — that dissolved Congress. His administration ultimately collapsed in a mire of scandals that ended with Fujimori in prison for embezzling government funds and maintaining extrajudicial death squads. (He was released for health reasons in 2023 and died in 2024.)

In 2007, Vargas Llosa became a citizen of Spain, and he never lived in Peru again. But South American politics would make regular appearances in his political commentary, which grew increasingly right-wing with the passage of time. In 2022, asked his thoughts about the Brazilian presidential election, he said that he preferred Jair Bolsanoro, the right-wing president then seeking reelection — a virulent populist who deployed the sorts of authoritarian tactics the author had once decried.

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa arrives for a news conference for his new book ‘Tiempos recios’ in Madrid in 2019.

(Manu Fernandez / Associated Press)

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, on March 28, 1936, the son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, a radio operator for an aviation company, and Dora Llosa Ureta.

The author’s childhood could have been a plot from one of his novels.

His parents married in 1935 after a brief courtship, but his father abandoned the family while his mother was pregnant. For much of his childhood — which included stints in Bolivia and in the northern Peruvian city of Piura, with his maternal grandparents — Vargas Llosa presumed his father to be dead.

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