The Guardian Profile: Mario Vargas Llosa Essay, Research Paper

Fiction and hyper-realityWhen Mario Vargas Llosa, the precocious star of the 1960s & # 8220 ; roar & # 8221 ; in Latin American fiction, ran for president in 1990 in his native Peru, many of his most devouring readers prayed he would lose. As his friend, the Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante, observed: & # 8220 ; Peru & # 8217 ; s unsure addition would be literature & # 8217 ; s loss. Literature is eternity, political relations mere history. & # 8221 ; That may hold been light solace to the vanquished Vargas Llosa when the dark-horse master, Alberto Fujimori, seized dictatorial powers in 1992 and fell merely in 2000 in one of the most eccentric corruptness dirts in Latin American history. But for the about adult male, who maintains that he lost the election mostly for stating the truth, his campaigning was a & # 8220 ; awful error & # 8221 ; which he does non repent. & # 8220 ; It was a really informative experience, though non pleasant, & # 8221 ; he smiles stiffly. & # 8220 ; I learned a batch about Peru, about political relations and about myself: I learned I & # 8217 ; m non a politician but a writer. & # 8221 ; For the expatriate Spanish author Juan Goytisolo, Vargas Llosa is & # 8220 ; one of the best novelists in the Spanish linguistic communication of our clip & # 8221 ; . In 1963 at merely 26, holding published a ground-breaking introduction novel The Time Of The Hero, Vargas Llosa was in the head of the roar, earning international acclamation for Latin American literature, alongside the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel Garc & # 237 ; a M & # 225 ; rquez. But far from being an advocate of their & # 8220 ; magic pragmatism & # 8221 ; he is a & # 8220 ; hyper-realist & # 8221 ; , says Jason Wilson, professor of Latin American literature at University College London. Yet Vargas Llosa & # 8217 ; s political flight has brought him enemies. His move from back uping to denouncing Fidel Castro & # 8217 ; s Cuba in the early 1970s spurred a falling out with the roar writers ; he ridiculed his former friend Garc & # 237 ; a M & # 225 ; rquez as & # 8220 ; Castro & # 8217 ; s courtesan & # 8221 ; . By the eightiess he had declared a funny affinity with British conservative thought. He subsequently stood for the Peruvian presidential term on a platform of Andean Thatcherism. & # 8220 ; His political place stains his literature, & # 8221 ; says the Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela. For many supporters he remains a confusing complex. & # 8220 ; He & # 8217 ; s a fantastic novelist but a hopeless, unsafe politician, & # 8221 ; says Richard Gott, writer of a recent book on Venezuela & # 8217 ; s president Hugo Ch & # 225 ; vez. & # 8220 ; He agrees with everything the United States does in Latin America. & # 8221 ; For the critic Alberto Manguel there is a & # 8220 ; disturbing paradox & # 8221 ; in the & # 8220 ; two Vargas Llosas & # 8221 ; between the vision of the novelist and dramatist and his positions in the imperativeness. Vargas Llosa began a parallel calling as a journalist at 15 and now writes columns for the Madrid newspaper El Pa & # 237 ; s. Comparing him to a & # 8220 ; sightless photographer & # 8230 ; blind to the human world that his lens had so strongly captured & # 8221 ; , Manguel says & # 8220 ; it seems as if the politician has ne’er read the author & # 8221 ; . Vargas Llosa & # 8217 ; s contusing political licking drove the memoir A Fish In The Water ( 1993 ) , whose capturing chapters on the budding creative person surrogate with what the Observer referee Boyd Tonkin called an & # 8220 ; epic whinge & # 8221 ; about his failed presidential command. His 13th novel, The Feast Of The Goat, published here following month in an English interlingual rendition by Edith Grossman, may be a elusive contemplation of his political baptism. Hailed by Manguel as a chef-d’oeuvre, it is set during and after the barbarous 1930-61 absolutism of President Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Spanish-speaking state bordering Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. It anticipates Trujillo & # 8217 ; s blackwash in 1961 through the dictator & # 8217 ; s eyes, those of his manque bravos and the expatriate girl of one of his Plutos. The portraiture of his heroic assassins as flawed proved explosive in the Dominican Republic when the writer visited for the Spanish publication in 2000. & # 8220 ; The households [ of the plotters ] weren & # 8217 ; t happy because, with a sufferer or hero, what you expect is hagiography, non pragmatism, & # 8221 ; says Vargas Llosa, who does believe the bravos were & # 8220 ; heroes, brave dreamers & # 8221 ; . Earlier this twelvemonth, nevertheless, he returned to Santo Domingo, the capital, to pick up a literary award. & # 8220 ; It made me happy because the contention was still traveling on: immature people were stating to their parents & # 8216 ; Why didn & # 8217 ; t you say a word during the absolutism? & # 8217 ; & # 8221 ; Now 65, Vargas Llosa betrays small mark of resentment, but instead laughs abundantly at reference of his presidential mob. He speaks heartily and enthusiastically in tonic English about the & # 8220 ; extremist liberalism & # 8221 ; he still champions. A double national ( he accepted Spanish citizenship in 1993 ) fluent in Spanish, Gallic and English, he lives in Paris, Madrid, the Peruvian capital Lima, and London, where he and his married woman Patricia have a broad, modern flat in Knightsbridge, opposite Harrods. Of their three kids, all educated in England, Alvaro is a journalist and author ( & # 8221 ; the existent politician of the household & # 8221 ; ) , Gonzalo works for UNHCR in Geneva, and Morgana is a photojournalist for El Pa & # 237 ; s in Madrid. & # 8220 ; We try to see each other at least twice a twelvemonth, & # 8221 ; their male parent says. Last fall he took up a chair in Ibero-American literature and civilization at Georgetown University in Washington DC. The instruction committedness is flexible, but the station will be for at least five old ages. Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, a colonial metropolis at the pes of the Misti vent in southern Peru. His parents had separated before he was born, his male parent, Ernesto Vargas, walking out after merely five months of matrimony to Dora Llosa. Mario grew up in his female parent & # 8217 ; s middle-class household, which boasted of Spanish forbears but had modest agencies. Shamed by Dora & # 8217 ; s & # 8220 ; fatherless & # 8221 ; kid they moved to Bolivia, where Mario & # 8217 ; s maternal gramps, Pedro Llosa, became Peruvian consul in Cochabamba. After eight old ages in this & # 8220 ; paradise & # 8221 ; , with an tremendous house and retainers, they returned to Peru where Pedro became prefect of the northern coastal town of Piura. A relation of Peru & # 8217 ; s elected president, Jose Luis Bustamente, Pedro Llosa resigned in 1948 after a military putsch. Mario was 10 before he learned his male parent, a wireless operator, was still alive. His parents reconciled and he and his female parent moved to the capital, Lima, to populate with Ernesto, who Mario hated and feared for his fury and whippings. & # 8220 ; Reading was my flight, & # 8221 ; the boy says. But Ernesto despised Mario & # 8217 ; s literary propensities as being a path to famishment, or, worse still, cogent evidence of homosexualism. The shy, sheltered male child, teased as & # 8220 ; Bugs Bunny & # 8221 ; for his vaulting horse dentition, was packed off at 14 to the Leoncio Prado military academy in Lima, to do a adult male of him. It was, he says, like detecting snake pit. & # 8220 ; Leoncio Prado was a window on the existent state, Peruvian society in illumination. Because of grants you had all societal categories and races & # 8211 ; white, black, Indians, mestizos [ assorted Spanish-Indian parenthood ] , mulattos [ mixed black-white parenthood ] , from the upper category to the really hapless. It was an explosive clime where everybody was prejudiced, with enormous tenseness and force. I suffered because I was spoiled, but it was an extraordinary lesson. & # 8221 ; He adds: & # 8220 ; My male parent was terrified by my literary dispositions & # 8211 ; he thought me a entire failure, a Bohemian. But with Leoncio Prado he gave me my first subject. & # 8221 ; In The Time Of The Hero the academy, with its military subject and intimidation, is a violent microcosm of & # 8220 ; particoloured Peruvian society & # 8221 ; under General Manuel Odr & # 237 ; a & # 8217 ; s 1948-56 military regulation. Transcripts of the book were ceremoniously burned in the academy & # 8217 ; s evidences and the writer barred. This twelvemonth, nevertheless, Vargas Llosa was invited back with a British Television crew for a South Bank Show to be broadcast on April 28. & # 8220 ; I was received with such kindness by the colonel & # 8211 ; the caput of the school & # 8211 ; who gave me as a present the Peruvian flag, & # 8221 ; laughs Vargas Llosa. & # 8220 ; Machismo is, unluckily, still really much alive in Latin America, & # 8221 ; he says. & # 8220 ; I had to mask my literary career in a manner that the machista environment would accept it. & # 8221 ; He penned & # 8220 ; beautiful, romantic letters & # 8221 ; for fellow plebes to direct their girlfriends and & # 8220 ; titillating short narratives & # 8221 ; . Saturday afternoons frequently involved visits to the whorehouse, a & # 8220 ; cardinal establishment in Latin American life, & # 8221 ; he says. & # 8220 ; It has declined with greater openness in sexual wonts. But at that clip, with sexual control so rigorous, the whorehouse had mystical echos linked to taboos and transgression. & # 8221 ; A Piura whorehouse gave its name to his 2nd novel, The Green House ( 1966 ) , besides inspired by a trip into Peru & # 8217 ; s Amazonian jungle. At 15, Vargas Llosa worked as a night-owl newsman for the Lima newspaper La Cr & # 243 ; nica, detecting an bottom of offense and harlotry in the capital, which went on to feed his 3rd novel, Conversation In The Cathedral ( 1969 ) . In his memoir he writes that he lost his Catholic religion after a priest & # 8217 ; s efforts to molest him when he was 12. Rebeling against his parents & # 8217 ; pick of the Catholic university for & # 8220 ; blancos & # 8221 ; ( Whites ) , he studied literature and jurisprudence at San Marcos in Lima, the secular university & # 8220 ; for ladino, atheists and Communists & # 8221 ; . He was a member of an belowground Communist cell, but merely briefly. & # 8220 ; I was prepared to accept the most unbelievable amentias but non socialist realism. & # 8221 ; In 1955 he eloped with his aunt Julia Urquidi when he was 19 and she 32, an confederation that brought rapprochement with his male parent, who thought matrimony at least a & # 8220 ; virile act & # 8221 ; . His amusing chef-d’oeuvre Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter ( 1977 ) alternated the narratives of a Bolivian author of wireless soap operas with his eight-year matrimony, & # 8220 ; a sort of soap opera excessively, full of turbulency and melodrama & # 8221 ; . William Boyd, who adapted the novel for a 1990 Hollywood movie Tune In Tomorrow, set in New Orleans, found it & # 8220 ; enormously imaginative and amusing, and amazingly rude in its onslaughts, say on Argentinians, who are seen as grandiloquent. It & # 8217 ; s about Swiftian, with a quality of phantasy that sees the universe as lurid and absurd. & # 8221 ; Urquidi, whom Vargas Llosa divorced in 1964, responded with a case and her ain 1983 memoir, What Varguitas Did Not Say. In 1958 a trip to Paris & # 8211 ; the award in a short narrative competition & # 8211 ; led to a 16-year self-imposed expatriate from Peru in Madrid ( where he wrote his doctorial thesis on Garc & # 237 ; a M & # 225 ; rquez ) , London and Barcelona every bit good as in Paris. The Time Of The Hero made him celebrated overnight. Working for a Gallic radio-TV web in Paris he met other authors of the roar, including Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cort & # 225 ; zar, Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias. He shared the enthusiasm for the 1959 Cuban revolution, so broke with Castro over the 1971 & # 8220 ; demo test & # 8221 ; of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. It caused clash with Garc & # 237 ; a M & # 225 ; rquez, though their friendly relationship ended eventually when Vargas Llosa threw a clout at the hereafter Nobel laureate in a Mexico City film in 1975. The Peruvian refuses to speak about it, but Garc & # 237 ; a M & # 225 ; rquez has said the difference concerned a adult female. Though the two have non spoken since, they still have friends in common, including Fuentes. In 1965 Vargas Llosa married his cousin Patricia, 10 old ages his junior. He remembers her as a & # 8220 ; small seven-year-old Satan hidden behind a cunning turned-up olfactory organ & # 8221 ; in his uncle & # 8217 ; s house in Piura. They fell in love in Paris when she was analyzing at the Sorbonne. In London & # 8217 ; s Earl & # 8217 ; s Court they became neighbors with Cabrera Infante, who recalled his moustachioed friend as fine-looking & # 8220 ; in the manner some South American authors were handsome in the last century ; his hair was combed sleek & # 8221 ; . Vargas Llosa would compose in his bantam level from 8am to 6pm while his married woman and babes fought off & # 8220 ; rats every bit large as Mustela nigripess & # 8221 ; in the kitchen. He taught at King & # 8217 ; s College in the late-1960s and shared a survey with Jason Wilson who found him & # 8220 ; friendly, but rather diffident, and he didn & # 8217 ; Ts like to acquire intoxicated & # 8211 ; he didn & # 8217 ; t carry through any Bohemian paradigms. He had enviably tough discipline. & # 8221 ; As Vargas Llosa wrote: & # 8220 ; I have ne’er & # 8230 ; lived the Bohemian life. & # 8221 ; For Manuel Puig, the late Argentine writer of Kiss Of The Spider Woman, who liked to delegate Hollywood-starlet monikers to his roar co-workers, Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams, the title-holder swimmer. Vargas Llosa & # 8217 ; s early fiction excoriated the Peruvian middle class but with a edification inspired by Flaubert & # 8211 ; about whom he wrote a critical work, The Perpetual Orgy ( 1975 ) & # 8211 ; and Faulkner. His end was what he called the & # 8220 ; entire novel & # 8221 ; , turn toing every facet of Peruvian society and the consequence of political relations on the characters & # 8217 ; minds, with multiple point of views and an unseeable storyteller. With Captain Pantoja And The Particular Service ( 1973 ) he introduced humour into his novels. On his trip to the Amazon, he had stumbled on a cocotte service ordered for a fort in the jungle: & # 8220 ; I tried to compose it in a serious manner but it was impossible. It was a great discovery. & # 8221 ; In 1974 Vargas Llosa and his household set up a lasting place once more in Peru, in a beachside suburb of Lima. A movie of Captain Pantoja, which he co-directed, was

banned or censored across Latin America and he frequently clashed with the region’s worsening dictatorships. In 1977, as president of the writers’ club International PEN, he wrote an open letter of protest to the Argentinian dictator Jorge Videla. By now world famous he hosted a Lima talk show in the early 1980s and in 1982, pursuing another passion, he covered World Cup football in Spain. He backed the 1980-85 conservative government of Fernando Belaunde Terry in Peru but turned down an invitation in 1984 to become prime minister. Across Latin America military regimes were fighting guerrilla movements such as the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, led by Abimael Guzman (who was captured in 1992). Vargas Llosa’s novel The War Of The End Of The World (1981) recreated the apocalyptic clash between a revolutionary commune in 19th-century Brazil and the troops sent to crush it. He distrusts revolutionary utopias, tracing the roots of violence to religious and political fanaticism – “deep down, everything’s religious, even if it has a mask”. His essays, collected in Making Waves (1996), chart his disenchantment with the legacy of Che Guevara as “messianic dogma”. He attacked Gunter Grass for “double standards” in backing revolutions in Latin America he would condemn in his own country. Some thought his politics was beginning to mar his fiction. Jason Wilson sees The Real Life Of Alejandro Mayta (1984) as “loaded against the character of the failed revolutionary and homosexual”, an ageing Trotskyist. Salman Rushdie deemed the novel Vargas Llosa’s “first overtly rightwing tract” which reduced Peru to a “comic-strip”. In a 1986 lecture in Edinburgh, Latin America: Fiction and Reality, Vargas Llosa said: “We, westernised Latin Americans have persevered in the worst habits of our forebears… We share the mentality of the conquistadors.” Yet he has been criticised for advocating the “sacrifice” of indigenous cultures. “There are two very different cultures in Latin America, with different levels of development,” he says. “The equitable ideal would be to modernise the archaic so that most of their values and institutions survive. But that’s not been reached by any society in the world. It’s usually solved with a sacrifice – the elimination of the primitive or archaic.” His novel Death In The Andes (1993) can be read as a cry of frustration with irrationality and superstition. It came out of his first political commission, which was to investigate the killing of eight journalists in a remote Andean village in 1983.”It was set in a period when terrorism and counter-terrorism threatened to destroy the fabric of Peru, or bring a return to the tribe, to the past, to superstition, unreason, a religious approach to life, as in Afghanistan or Iran,” he says. “What we call civilisation is real but it’s also very fragile; underground the old demons are still alive. Through culture and democracy they can be tamed but never destroyed.” For Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish at Amherst College, Massachusetts, Vargas Llosa’s “career shows how a Europeanised man of letters looks at religiosity and mythology – with suspicion and also with admiration. While Abimael Guzman wanted to return Peru to its pre-conquistador past – a Maoist return to Inca empire – Vargas Llosa was trying to present Peruvian society as open, cosmopolitan and attached to European values. The left wants to embrace the indigenous peoples rather than look to Europe. He’s impatient with that.” Manguel deems Death In The Andes a “racist novel”, the Andean Indians “as lifeless as… Rider Haggard’s savage Africans”. They are “portrayed as somehow deserving of their fate because they’re not capable of civilisation – by which he means, of course, western civilisation”. “I don’t think civilisation is a European patrimony,” Vargas Llosa says. “Only democratic culture can make enemies coexist and it’s deeply rooted in many European places. But Bosnia and Kosovo are also in Europe and there’s terrorism in Spain, in Ireland. Civilisation belongs to any society or individual that adopts it.” He adds: “I think progress exists: it’s an improvement when there are equal rights for women and men, when you can vote for your rulers. Collectivist societies never have these institutions.” For Vargas Llosa, the eroticism of his novels In Praise Of The Stepmother (1988) and The Notebooks Of Don Rigoberto (1997) is also an “expression of civilisation, where sex is surrounded by rituals and ceremonies; you don’t have it in primitive societies”. He was amused by a New York Times review of Don Rigoberto which saw the novel as pornography. “This American professor of literature identified more than 25 sexual perversions in the novel. I was fascinated. He read it without humour, as puritans read books.” For the author, the difference between erotica and pornography is “purely artistic: if it’s well written and persuasive it’s erotic; if it’s mediocre it becomes vulgar and pornographic”. But in Valenzuela’s view Don Rigoberto is “not pornographic but boring. It’s critical of a male perspective but it’s not erotic or sincere.” During Vargas Llosa’s political campaign his opponents smeared him as a “pornographic slanderer” and had those novels read out on TV. Vargas Llosa has always said the social obligations of the Latin American writer are more onerous than those of their counterparts in Europe. He was moved to protest in 1987 against President Alan Garcia’s plan to nationalise the Peruvian financial system. Vargas Llosa’s rally drew 120,000 people and became the start of a three-year presidential campaign for the Democratic Front coalition. He had death threats and abusive phone calls. His wife tried to dissuade him from running. In his memoir he concedes that she may have been right to say he was drawn by “the adventure, the illusion of living an experience of excitement and risk, of writing the great novel in real life.” Yet he maintains that he entered politics “pushed by civic and moral reasons: I thought something should be done to preserve a fragile democratic system which was collapsing because of terrorism, corruption, hyperinflation.” Though he led the polls his initial majority was not enough to secure a mandate. In the second round, in June 1990, Fujimori was backed by the incumbent government. “I learned that the important things in politics are not just ideas and values but also sordid manoeuvring and intrigues,” he says. “A dirty war is always going on – it’s just more disguised in advanced democracies. It was depressing, not because I lost but because of the way a whole society could be so easily manipulated… I didn’t lie. I said we needed radical reforms and social sacrifices and in the beginning it worked. But then came the dirty war, presenting my reforms as something that would destroy jobs. It was very effective, especially with the poorest of society. In Latin America we prefer promises to reality.” In Gott’s view “his novels had some sensitivity towards the great majority in Peru, who are mostly Indian or mestizo. But as a politician he identified himself with the oligarchic elite.” Vargas Llosa’s “kitchen cabinet” (his son Alvaro was his press spokesman, his cousin campaign manager) was known as the “Royal Family”. After his defeat, he was insulted in the streets with the words, “Get out, gringo”. “I was not a good politician,” he says. “It was damaging to be associated with some political parties. Fujimori presented himself as the underdog, though he was very rich.” The loser was also criticised in Peru for leaving the country within hours of his defeat and taking up Spanish nationality. “Peruvians have made it a sport to hate Vargas Llosa,” says Stavans. Others point out that this choice was made long before and that Madrid is the crucial publishing centre for Spanish-language writers now that Mexico City and Buenos Aires have collapsed. Vargas Llosa is a self-confessed “cosmopolitan and expatriate who has always detested nationalism” (he even says “Thatcher and the Conservatives have become nationalistic – I wouldn’t vote for them now”). Yet while Gott sees him as a “rootless cosmopolitan in the European tradition – more at home in London or Paris or Barcelona”, Vargas Llosa calls Peru a “constant torment”, his relationship to it “more adulterous than conjugal, full of suspicion, passion and rages”. After Fujimori’s “self-coup” in 1992 his presidential rival urged international sanctions against the regime. Some saw Vargas Llosa as a traitor and he was accused of tax evasion. “During Fujimori’s first two years I was very discreet,” he says. “But I’ve been against dictatorships all my life. My situation became very difficult: I was persona non grata in Peru, discredited and insulted in the official press – Fujimori controlled everything. It was difficult because I couldn’t respond.” He returned under the dictatorship only for a few days in 1995, for his mother’s funeral. Forced to resign over corruption allegations in 2000, Fujimori, a Japanese Peruvian, fled to Japan while his security chief, Vladimiro Montesinos (whose filmed dirty deals became known as the “Vladivideos”), is held in the same Lima prison as Shining Path’s Guzman. Though there has been a return to democracy, Vargas Llosa’s son Alvaro has fallen out with the new president, Alejandro Toledo. “They had a quarrel. He accused entrepreneur friends of the president of trying to make improper deals with the state. Now there are defamation suits against Alvaro.” But Vargas Llosa, who recently spent three months in Peru, does not agree with his stance. “There are many things to criticise, but I haven’t perceived any dirty dealings.” The Feast Of The Goat forms a belated addition to – some say the pinnacle of – the genre of Latin American “dictator novels” that include I The Supreme (1974), by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, and Garcia Marquez’s Autumn Of The Patriarch (1975). The new book was also conceived in the mid-1970s, when Vargas Llosa was on an eight-month visit to the Dominican Republic to film Captain Pantoja (”it was crazy; during the night I read about how to make films and during the day I shot one”). Yet it is tempting to read into it the author’s hands-on experience of Peruvian politics. “Fujimori was quite different to Trujillo – a more mediocre tyrant,” he says. “His big ambition and appetite was money. What Trujillo wanted was power.” Yet he sees parallels: “As with Trujillo, Fujimori was very popular. Though dirty things were going on – torture, killings and corruption – his image was of a strongman who would defend people against the terrorists.” The main subject of The Feast Of The Goat is perhaps not the dictator as much as the complicity of his subjects, and the abiding temptation to choose the strongman, the caudillo. “I didn’t want to present Trujillo as a grotesque monster or brutal clown, as is usual in Latin American literature,” Vargas Llosa says. “I wanted a realist treatment of a human being who became a monster because of the power he accumulated and the lack of resistance and criticism. Without the complicity of large sections of society and their infatuation with the strongman, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Castro wouldn’t have been where they were; converted into a god, you become a devil.” Vargas Llosa is now at work on a novel about the artist Paul Gauguin, which returns to his theme of destructive utopias. Gauguin wanted paradise on earth, he says. “He was convinced it existed in primitive communities that Europe had destroyed: he searched in Brittany, Martinique, Panama, Tahiti… I distrust the idea that you can build a paradise here in history. That idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban. When you want paradise you produce first extraordinary idealism. But at some time, you produce hell.” Life at a glance: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa Born: March 28 1936, Arequipa, Peru. Education: Leoncio Prado military academy, Lima; San Marco University, Lima; Complutense University Madrid (PhD 1959). Married: Julia Urquidi 1955-64; Patricia Llosa ‘65- (two sons, Alvaro and Gonzalo; one daughter, Morgana). Career: 1951- journalist and writer; ‘90 presidential candidate Peru; 2001- professor of Ibero-American literature and culture, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Some books: The Time Of The Hero 1963; The Green House ‘66; Conver sation In The Cathedral ‘69; Captain Pantoja And The Special Service ‘73; The Perpetual Orgy ‘75; Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter ‘77; The War Of The End Of The World ‘81; The Storyteller ‘87; A Fish In The Water ‘93; Death In The Andes ‘93; The Notebooks Of Don Rigoberto ‘97; The Feast Of The Goat 2000. · The Feast of the Goat is published by Faber & Faber on April 8 at ?16.99. Mario Vargas Llosa will be at the Watershed in Bristol next Tuesday at 7pm, tickets: 0117 925 3845; and the South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, on Tuesday March 26 at 7.30pm, tickets: 020 7960 4242.