Mario Vargas Llosa, RIP
By 
Mario Vargas Llosa had truly horrific politics in the second half of his life and was basically a fascist by the end. But he also is one of the greatest novelists in any language ever. The War of the End of the World is in my view a top 10 all-time work of fiction. Other books are great too, though maybe not all of them. He died yesterday at the age of 89.
For Aguirre and Buynova, Vargas Llosa’s later description of his five-day visit to Moscow was ‘a way of fixing in history and memory a heavily symbolic episode that, in this new narrative, allowed for no nuances’. Vargas Llosa’s memories are of course his own, but it’s true that his rendering of the visit in The Call of the Tribe does come across as a predictable ideological fable. The idea that he was ‘traumatised’ by his 1968 visit is also undercut by the fact that he went back in 1977, as president of the PEN Club, without making much of the experience either way. But this raises some questions. It would be to Vargas Llosa’s credit if the sources of his disenchantment with the left were the crushing of the Prague Spring and the worsening intellectual climate in Cuba. Why, then, did he make the Moscow trip seem more decisive than it was? Perhaps by the time he was writing The Call of the Tribe, he had come to think that sending in tanks was a reasonable option, so long as they were deployed against the left, as many of his new-found friends on the Latin American right regularly counselled. It may also seem curious that Vargas Llosa turned his Moscow visit into a Cold War fable 27 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But as the recent evolution of the Latin American right shows, the attachment to anti-communist convictions increases the more distant the memory of communism itself becomes.
There remains the question of when and why Vargas Llosa moved quite so far to the right. His rejection of leftist ideas didn’t immediately translate into conservatism. While his personal and political differences with the other Boom writers certainly intensified after 1968 – he ended up punching García Márquez in the face in Mexico City in 1976 – the shift to authoritarian neoliberalism seems to have accelerated mainly since the turn of the century, above all in response to the leftward turn in Latin America known as the ‘pink tide’.
But the reinvigoration of the electoral left doesn’t fully account for the rightward turn of many former Latin American liberals. Vargas Llosa himself gave what amounts to an explanation during his second visit to the USSR in 1977. In an interview with the journal Latinskaya Amerika, he remarked that the richness of the contemporary Latin American novel came from its crisis-ridden context. Taken together, recent works were ‘a projection on the formal, symbolic, artistic level of a world that is ending’. Across the region, he said, ‘there is a whole old society that is in a period of decline’ and ‘no one believes in this society today, not even its beneficiaries.’ This was already true in the 1960s and 1970s, as agrarian societies gave way to urbanised ones. It applies still more to the post-2000 period, as the neoliberal order of the 1990s – of which Vargas Llosa had been a leading proponent – continues to unravel. The pink tide confirmed its failure, and attempted to chart a new path from the left. Faced with that prospect, Vargas Llosa, beset by Cold War phantoms and still proclaiming his liberalism, has instead gravitated towards the darker scenarios put forward by the right.
The banality of it all is really just depressing.