Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in English
Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin American literature’s modern greats, died April 13 in Lima, Peru. He was 89.
He died surrounded by his family and “at peace,” his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa announced in a social post.
“He enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,” they added.
That body of work is huge. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa was also with once close friend Gabriel García Márquez, the towering star of the Latin American Boom, which brought to global attention the works of young Latin American writers – Peru’s Vargas Llosa, Colombia García Márquez, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar and Cuba’s Guillermo Cabrera Infante – which were among the first Latin American novelists to be published in Europe.
Combining a large influence of European modernism, William Faulkner, experiment and word play, in the case of Garcia Márquez, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa their novels also shone a spotlight on the huge problems confronting contemporary Latin America which Vargas Llosa argued were too large to ever be ignored.
Vargas Llosa first novel, 1962’s “The Time of the Hero,” depicting the corruption, brutality at iron hierarchy at a military school, won Barcelona-based Seis Barral’s Bibioteca Breve prize, helping to found the Boom, engineered in part by Vargas Llosa and García Márquez’s Barcelona-based aged Carmen Barcells.
His third novel, 1969’s “Conversation in the Cathedral,” was commonly hailed a masterpiece, asking in its much quoted second sentence, “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Vargas Llosa traces an answer to the corruption of Manuel A. Odría dictatorship and the mediocrity of Perú ruling elite.
Vargas Llosa’s last great novel, 2000’s “The Feast of the Goat” returned to dictatorship, that of Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. It was praised by the Nobel Prize Committee for its depiction of “the structures of power” and “images of the individual resistance, revolt and defeat.”
Blessed by dashing Latin looks, cosmopolitan – he spent much of is life in London, Paris and Barcelona – courteous and a gentleman, Vargas Llosa, like the world’s intelligentsia, supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.
He broke with Castro, however, over the imprisonment of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971 for his criticism of the regime, an affair which also broke the back of the Boom. Embracing neo-liberalism, Vargas Llosa distanced himself from Latin America’s left, had a celebrated fall out with García Márquez, and ran for Peru’s presidency with its center-right Frente Democrático. As a journalism, his opinions sometimes proved outspoken, such as in 2018 when he claimed that feminism was “the most determined enemy of literature.”+
What remains, however, is a set of novels which traced Latin America’s ills with style and a deep-seated sweeping pleasure of narration, seen at its best in 1981’s “The War of the End of the World,” a critique of fanaticism set in Brazil’s 1896-98 War of Canudos.
Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” inspired by his first marriage to writer Julia Urquidi, was adapted by Jon Amiel as a movie in 1990, “Tune in Tomorrow,” written by William Boyd and featuring Barbara Hershey, Keanu Reeves and Peter Falk.
ViX, the streaming service of TelevisaUnivision’ adapted Vargas Llosa’s “The Bad Girl” into series in 2022. Luis Llosa (Anaconda), the writer’s cousin adapted “The Feast of the Goat” in an English-language thriller and released last year “Tattoos in the Memory,” with a screenplay by Vargas Llosa himself.
The most successful adaptation of Vargas Llosa’s work may remain, however, to be fellow Peruvian Francisco Lombardi’s “The City and the Dogs” a big screen makeover of “The Time of the Hero,” which was selected for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 1985 and won Lombardi best director at San Sebastian.
