Novelist William Boyd pays tribute to ‘a great chroncicler of the highs and lows of our carnal and passionate adventures as human beings’.
I first met Mario Vargas Llosa in London in 1989, at a dinner party organised by a mutual friend, Nicholas Shakespeare. I had been hired by a Hollywood studio to write a script based on Vargas Llosa’s wonderful semi-autobiographical novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and was both very keen and somewhat wary about the prospective encounter. I was very keen because I was an unashamed fan of Vargas Llosa, the writer – it took me a second to accept the Aunt Julia job – but wary because I quickly came to realise that the book was a fantastically difficult challenge to turn into a movie and my Hollywood brief was uncompromising: there was no way the film was going to be placed in its vividly rendered setting in Lima, Peru – Aunt Julia had to be Americanised.
In fact, the meeting couldn’t have been more reassuring and agreeable. Vargas Llosa was as enthused as I was about the possible film and unperturbed about its required US location (we ended up with New Orleans, as close to Lima as the US could provide, I calculated). He gave the enterprise his blessing: “Make it a bold adaptation,” he said, urging me to take risks. And so, taking him at his word, I did. And I am relieved to report that he liked the eventual film (starring a young Keanu Reeves in the Vargas Llosa role).
And now he has won the Nobel prize for literature. Does it strain interpretation to see in that first meeting some of the factors that might have gained him the prize? Cosmopolitanism, pluralism, conviviality, worldliness, multi- lingualism, audacity, comedy, experimentalism, are all epithets that can be attached to his name and his work. Aunt Julia is probably my favourite novel of his – for obvious reasons – but the body of work that Vargas Llosa has produced since his first novel, The Time of the Hero in 1963, is both prodigious and admirable. The range is remarkable – from the surreal fantasies of the radio soap operas in Aunt Julia to the baroque comedy of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service; from weighty historical epics such as The War at the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat to the whodunit thriller-style of Who Killed Palomero Molero? Vargas Llosa is very hard to classify and pin down as a writer: he has written short novels and very long novels, comic novels and deeply serious novels, straightforward realistic novels and recognisably South American “magic-realist” novels. Perhaps this unclassifiability has been seen as a disadvantage. Indeed, when one compares Vargas Llosa to his great South American literary rival Gabriel García Márquez one is reminded of Archilochus’s old fox and hedgehog adage: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Márquez, a hedgehog novelist if there ever was one, received his Nobel in 1982 at the age of 55. Vargas Llosa received his at the age of 74. Almost 30 years later the day of the fox has arrived – it inevitably comes around, even if it takes a little longer.
