Mario Vargas Llosa, who recently passed away at 89, was a pivotal figure in literature and politics, especially regarding his native Peru. His 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, poignantly opens with a question reflecting the political turmoil throughout Latin America. Over his career, Llosa published about 30 novels, often critically examining Peru's inequalities and governance. Despite his evolving political views—from Marxism to skepticism—his deep commitment to addressing societal issues remained. His work catalyzed discussions on Latin American futures, making him a significant cultural figure for many.
"At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?" So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world."},{"quote":"Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima this past weekend at the age of 89, nurtured a lifelong obsession with his native Peru: its corrupt political ecosystem, its inequality, its incapacity to make good on its promise. He dissected that obsession in many of his 30 novels. The answers he came up with never fully satisfied him, which only meant that he posed the question from another angle in the next book."},{"quote":"I got to know Vargas Llosa in his later years, after he had lost a run for president of Peru and won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He and I shared an agnostic attitude toward government. It is frequently said that doubt is the engine of intelligence, and he had a great deal of both."},{"quote":"His omnivorous intellect went from one topic to another, exploring them in minute detail. Like most members of his generation-the authors of the so-called literary Latin American boom of the 1960s and '70s, which put the region on the cultural map-he entered adulthood as a Marxist."}],
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