More than any other writer, past or present, I wanted to have lunch with Mario Vargas Llosa. I figured Ernest Hemingway would get drunk on daiquiris and James Joyce would expect me to have read Finnegans Wake. That left the great Peruvian Nobel Laureate, who recently passed away at the age of 89. 

Without a doubt, Vargas Llosa was our greatest living novelist. No one else even came close. He wrote over 30 novels, starting with Time of the Hero in 1962 and ending with Harsh Times in 2021. In between were masterpieces like Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), Feast of the Goat (2000), and my own favorite, The Bad Girl (2006). I’ve read them all many times. In comparison, his arch-frenemy Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a one-trick pony. Without One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabo would hardly be read today. But Vargas Llosa left us an impressive body of work that helped define the Latin American Boom in the 1960s and then transcended it decades later. More on these two later.

I came across Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter in a bookstore on Harvard Square, and I skipped a few classes to finish reading it. The narrator is a young man who befriends a scriptwriter churning out radio shows, and his story is interspersed with the scripts. As the scriptwriter goes mad, his scripts grow increasingly deranged. Vargas Llosa didn’t invent the “novel within a novel” trick (Cervantes did in Don Quixote) but no one has done it better since then. It’s laugh-out-loud funny.

I was in law school when I read The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. Influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, it’s about a failed Peruvian revolutionary, told from numerous conflicting perspectives. The more we learn about Mayta, the less we understand him. In the last chapter it appears as though Mayta was a figment of the author’s imagination. Or was he?

By the time I read Feast of the Goat, I was a magazine publisher. It’s a political thriller about the assassination of the Dominican dictator Trujillo with the same intricate structure of his other books, but devoid of irony. The ambiguity of Mayta is gone, and Vargas Llosa reveals how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Bad Girl is another comic novel that has nothing to do with politics. The narrator recounts his lifelong love affair with an elusive woman whose name we never learn, and who betrays him over and over again. Needless to say, she reminded me of someone.

Even Homer nods off, and a few of his books left me yawning. I still have yet to make it through the opaque Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) and some of his historical fiction like Dream of the Celt (2010) reveals a pedantic streak. He was proud if his erudition and showed it.

Vargas Llosa was a man of letters in the mold of Gustave Flaubert, his favorite writer, and also wrote 20 books of nonfiction and countless essays on politics, culture, the arts, and many other topics. Taken together, this eclectic oeuvre reveals his development not just as a writer but an intellectual. Born in Arequipa, he grew up in Lima and left for Paris in 1959, at the age of 23. A few years later he met Garcia Marquez, another rising literary star. The two were neighbors in Barcelona and shared an enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution. This friendship soured when Vargas Llosa rejected Marxism, and Gabo grew close to Fidel. In 1976, they had an argument which ended in Vargas Llosa punching out the Colombian, no mean feat. Whether it was personal or political remains a mystery, because the two never spoke of it. Nor did they ever speak to each other again.

Throughout his life, Vargas Llosa was a nomad who lived in many cities around the world, often teaching at universities like Princeton. He returned to Peru to run for president in 1990, losing to Alberto Fujimori, who was later jailed. This is recounted in his fascinating memoir, A Fish in the Water (1993). His right-leaning politics probably kept him from getting the Nobel Prize for many years after Gabo did. According to one rumor, Fidel himself lobbied the liberal Swedish Academy on behalf of his friend. But Vargas Llosa eventually received it in 2010. “Good literature erects bridges between different peoples,” he said in his acceptance speech. He also received countless other literary prizes and honorary degrees, and was even elected to the Academie Francaise. He was a citizen of Peru as well as the Dominican Republic and Spain. King Juan Carlos gave him the hereditary title of Marques de Vargas Llosa.

To top it all off, Vargas Llosa was a bit of a womanizer, like many of his characters. His first wife was his aunt’s sister, the model for Aunt Julia, which scandalized his middle class family. His next marriage to his first cousin Patricia lasted 50 years, though there were rumors of infidelity. Still spry in his 80s, he became tabloid fodder when he left her for Isabel Preysler, the glamorous ex-wife of singer Julio Iglesias. The two separated in 2022.

It was in Paris that I met Vargas Llosa purely by chance and finally had lunch with him, sort of. I was living there in 2001 and writing a novel of my own. One rainy Saturday morning I took my oldest son (then age 5) to a café and voila, there was my favorite writer, treating his grandchildren to crepes. I wasn’t about to miss this opportunity and introduced myself. But he was very gracious and patted my son on the head. I wish I’d found out why he punched Garcia Marquez but instead I wanted some advice about my novel. Then I asked him what his favorite Peruvian restaurant was in Paris. “Peruvian food doesn’t translate well,” he said with a sad smile. We shook hands and I returned to my own table.

I can’t remember what I wanted to know about my novel, or even what he responded, not that it made a difference. But that moment, talking with Vargas Llosa in Paris, was the first time I truly felt like a writer. Gracias, Mario.