ABOUT THE only surprise attached to the announcement that Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian writer, narrowly defeated liberal presidential candidate and author of The War of the End of the World(1981, translation 1984), has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, is that he hadn't already won it.
Throughout an internationally bestselling career which has seen a steady output of sophisticated, intelligent, at times erotic and always ambitious fiction, Vargas Llosa has retained a high public profile as a commentator critical of the politics of his country – most particularly the poverty which has featured in his fiction. He is also a stylish, often perceptive literary critic – as evident from The Perpetual Orgy(1987), his intriguing study of Flaubert. In it, Vargas Llosa makes a case for Madame Bovary as the first modern novel and examines obsession, a quality which tends to dominate his own work.
Central to his claims for this honour is that, regardless of his political relevance, he is an artist, a storyteller; a politically astute Latin American but also a cosmopolitan with comic flair. He is the first high-profile Latin American writer to win since the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, in 1990. Before that, it had been awarded in 1982 to Colombian-born, Mexico City-based Gabriel García Márquez during the peak years of magic realism, 11 years after the Nobel committee had honoured the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
Vargas Llosa's premier position as Peru's major international literary figure has, admittedly, been challenged by the emergence of Santiago Roncagliolo, whose remarkable debut political thriller Red April(2006, English translated 2010) not only won Spain's major literary prize, it was translated by Vargas Llosa's long-time collaborator, Edith Grossman.
It could be argued that an evolving lightness of touch has deflected Vargas Llosa's early commitment to fiction with a political purpose. His most recent novel to be translated into English, The Bad Girl(2006, English translation 2008), suggests echoes of Nabokov's Lolita.
The narrative follows the various stages of a tormented and tormenting love felt by a man for a woman of many faces. It may seem at odds with the polemical fervour that inspired his explosive, heavily autobiographical first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), based on his experiences in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima. By exposing the vicious macho ethos that the academy perpetuated Vargas Llosa caused an uproar and 1,000 copies of the novel were ceremoniously burnt on the spot at the academy.
Born in 1936, he had set out to be a rebel and had written a play and several stories before turning his experiences as a military cadet into his first novel. But he had also befriended the aging José María Arguedas (1911-1969) who had introduced the young Vargas Llosa to the Indian culture of Peru which had been ignored by the literary circles in Lima.
"I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while," confides the narrator of The Storyteller (1987; translation 1989). It is an important line, and very revealing: Vargas Llosa has never forgotten either his country or his people. Peru's history undercuts his fiction. The Real life of Alejandro Mayta(1984; trans 1986) explores the revolutionary impulse, a theme which has been the lifeblood of Latin American fiction and poetry. Death in the Andes(1993; trans 1996) offers a further variation on that theme in complex plot set in an isolated community in the Andes. Part thriller, part political allegory, it is a dissection of Peruvian society.
It is interesting that for a writer with such an international vision as Vargas Llosa, and whose approach has much in common with European stylists such as the French-based Czech Milan Kundera and Nabokov, still an influence, he has consistently, with few exceptions such as The Feast of the Goat(2002), which draws on real-life horrors perpetrated in the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship, looked to his country's history and reality.
Truth and fact shape his stories; imagination, abetted by wit, cunning, sophisticated prose and meticulous, crafted detail do the rest. Possibly one of the strongest reasons for his enduring appeal is the fact that he was never overwhelmed by the excesses of magic realism and almost kept the genre at a distance.
There is nothing provincial or insular about receiving this announcement with a sigh of sympathy for William Trevor, a most deserving recipient, particularly as some rumours mentioned Alice Munro. But Vargas Llosa, whose finest novel may well remain that inventive, rich and strange reading experience that is The War of the End of the World, has many admirers, and if magic realism has lost its glamour, his fiction hasn't.
Although not quite the artist of recent laureates such as JM Coetzee (2003) or Günter Grass (1999), Mario Vargas Llosa will arrive in Stockholm with a large body of work. He is serious and he is funny and candid: never wary of drawing on personal experience. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977; translation 1982) is an impeccably timed comic novel playing on his theme of the young man and the older woman.
A later novel, In Praise of the Stepmother(1990, translation 1991), takes the erotic theme further with equal measures of wit and seriousness as he considers both the vulnerability and power of innocence. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto(1997; translation 1998) a sexual fantasy starring Don Rigoberto, insurance clerk by day, sex fiend by night, keeps both characters and readers guessing in a maze of longing and memory.
It may have seemed more likely for him to have won before, but now at the age of 74, Mario Vargas Llosa is not only honoured, he has a lively and extensive backlist of fiction written in Spanish and available in English translation, sufficient to keep most of the world’s readers occupied for quite a while.
