MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa died yesterday at the age of 89. He was one of the most celebrated writers in Latin America and the first Peruvian to win the Nobel Prize in literature. NPR's Mandalit del Barco has our remembrance.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, and he was told his father had died. But that wasn't true. His parents reunited when he was 10, as he told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1994.
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MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: Until then, I had been, let's say, a very spoiled child. And suddenly, I started to live with a man who was very rigorous, very strict.
DEL BARCO: Vargas Llosa took refuge in reading. His revenge was to write poetry. His father disapproved.
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VARGAS LLOSA: My father, as many middle-class people in Latin America in the '50s, thought that to be a writer was to be an eccentric, someone marginal.
DEL BARCO: Sent to military school, Vargas Llosa wrote his first novel, "Ciudad Y Los Perros" - in English, "The Time Of The Hero." The 1963 novel depicted the corruption of the school, the military and Peruvian society, as he told NPR in 2010.
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VARGAS LLOSA: It's a novel that tried to describe the consequences of a military authoritarian system.
DEL BARCO: Vargas Llosa said the school's leaders burned a thousand copies in the courtyard. While he was still a teen, Vargas Llosa became a journalist for local newspapers. He wrote plays and short stories and studied law and literature at Lima's Universidad de San Marcos. When he was 19, Vargas Llosa married his uncle's sister-in-law. She was 13 years older. He fictionalized that marriage in his 1977 novel, "Aunt Julia And The Script Writer."
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I wonder what your father would have said if he'd heard you.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I don't care.
DEL BARCO: After Vargas Llosa and his aunt divorced, he married his first cousin. They remained married for 50 years. The couple moved to Europe, and the locales of Vargas Llosa's novels expanded beyond Latin America. His politics changed, too. Vargas Llosa abandoned his support for the Cuban revolution and socialism, and he returned to Peru to lead a coalition opposing a plan to nationalize the banks. In 1990, he ran for president.
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VARGAS LLOSA: (Speaking Spanish).
DEL BARCO: "I've left behind my books and my desk," he said in a speech. He also ran against the brutal terrorism of the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path Maoist rebel group which killed an estimated 70,000 Peruvians, as he told NPR.
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VARGAS LLOSA: They tried to kill me twice, and they were ferocious.
DEL BARCO: Vargas Llosa's political opponents criticized his turn to the center-right. He lost to Alberto Fujimori, who Vargas Llosa sharply criticized in his 1993 memoir "A Fish In The Water." He told Fresh Air the book made him very unpopular at first.
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VARGAS LLOSA: But things have been changing since, and now, apparently, the regime is much more unpopular than myself. So I'm not so unpopular now, apparently, in Peru.
DEL BARCO: Vargas Llosa also had a famous literary feud with Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both were stars of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s, but their friendship ended when Vargas Llosa punched Garcia Marquez in the eye. Vargas Llosa won his Nobel literature prize in 2010.
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VARGAS LLOSA: (Speaking Spanish).
DEL BARCO: "Thanks to literature," he said in his speech, "we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality." Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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