Where to Start with Mario Vargas Llosa: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Mario Vargas Llosa — whether to begin with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Conversation in the Cathedral, or The Feast of the Goat. A complete guide.
Mario Vargas Llosa (born 1936) is the Peruvian novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 — cited by the Swedish Academy for ‘his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.’ Along with Gabriel García Márquez, he is the central figure of the Latin American literary ‘boom’ of the 1960s and 1970s that brought the region’s fiction to world attention. Vargas Llosa’s fiction is formally ambitious (he developed elaborate multiple-narrative, multi-temporal structures in his early novels), politically engaged (his subject is power — the corruption of political regimes, the complicity of individuals, the long shadow that dictatorship casts over ordinary life), and intellectually serious about the relationship between literature and society.
Where to Start: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)
The most immediately accessible Vargas Llosa — and his most joyfully comic novel. Marito, an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer working at a Lima radio station, conducts a scandalous love affair with his Aunt Julia (his uncle’s divorced Bolivian sister-in-law) while befriending Pedro Camacho, the radio station’s Bolivian scriptwriter who is simultaneously writing a dozen melodramatic serial dramas. Camacho’s scripts, reproduced in alternating chapters, become progressively more deranged as his mental state deteriorates.
The novel is both a fictionalized memoir (Vargas Llosa did marry his aunt-by-marriage in real life) and a sustained meditation on the relationship between high literature and popular entertainment, between the serious and the melodramatic. The most immediately entertaining entry to his work.
Conversation in the Cathedral (1969)
Vargas Llosa’s most formally ambitious novel — and one of the great political novels of the twentieth century. Santiago Zavala, the son of a prominent Lima businessman, encounters his father’s former chauffeur Ambrosio at a dog pound. Over the course of their conversation, the novel unravels four overlapping narratives set during the dictatorship of Manuel Odría in 1950s Lima, tracing the connections between Santiago’s father, the regime, Ambrosio, and the political violence that shaped their lives.
The title’s question — ‘At what moment had Peru fucked itself up?’ — frames the novel’s entire inquiry. It is long and demanding but one of the most powerful accounts of how political corruption penetrates every relationship and every self.
The Feast of the Goat (2000)
Vargas Llosa’s most widely read novel and his most accessible political fiction — set during the final days of Rafael Trujillo’s thirty-year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Three parallel narratives: Urania, a Dominican woman returning from New York to visit her stroke-damaged father and confront a memory she has suppressed; the conspirators who killed Trujillo in May 1961; and Trujillo himself in his last day, his physical decline a mirror of his regime’s decay.
The novel is one of the finest fictional portraits of a dictator in Latin American literature — more historically grounded than García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, more novelistically accessible than Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme. His most powerful portrait of absolute power and its human cost.
The War of the End of the World (1981)
Vargas Llosa’s most epic novel — based on the historical Canudos War in northeastern Brazil in the 1890s, when a millenarian religious community led by an itinerant prophet called the Counselor was destroyed by the Brazilian federal army in four bloody campaigns. The novel follows soldiers, journalists, politicians, and the community’s members through the conflict, rendering the war from multiple perspectives without imposing a single interpretation.
His most structurally complex novel and his most historical; essential for readers who want the full range of his ambition.
Reading Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa’s fiction is distinguished by its formal inventiveness — the multiple narratives, the temporal jumps, the simultaneous dialogue that he developed and refined across his career — and by its political seriousness. He is interested in power: where it comes from, how it corrupts, how ordinary people are implicated in structures that destroy them. His commitment to liberalism (he ran for president of Peru in 1990) makes him a controversially political figure; his commitment to fiction makes him one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century. Begin with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter for the most immediately accessible and the most entertaining; read The Feast of the Goat for the most powerful and the most historically engaging.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Mario Vargas Llosa?
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) is the most accessible and the most immediately entertaining starting point — a semi-autobiographical comic novel set in Lima in the 1950s, following a young law student and aspiring writer who has an affair with his older aunt-by-marriage while befriending a brilliant and deranged radio scriptwriter. The novel is funny, structurally inventive, and a perfect introduction to Vargas Llosa's wit and his fascination with the relationship between life and fiction. Conversation in the Cathedral is the best alternative for readers who want his most ambitious and most politically serious novel.
What is Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter about?
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) alternates between two narratives: the autobiographical account of Marito (an early version of the author), an eighteen-year-old law student in Lima who falls in love with his thirty-two-year-old Aunt Julia, and a series of melodramatic radio soap opera scripts written by the demented genius Pedro Camacho. The two narratives gradually converge as Camacho's soap operas become more unhinged and the characters and plots begin to bleed into each other. The novel is both a love story and a meditation on the relationship between life and fiction, reality and melodrama, that runs through all of Vargas Llosa's work.
What is Conversation in the Cathedral about?
Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) is set in Lima during the dictatorship of Manuel Odría in the 1950s and follows Santiago Zavala, the disillusioned son of a prominent businessman, who runs into his father's former chauffeur Ambrosio at a dog pound. Their conversation over drinks, which lasts most of the day, becomes the frame for the novel's multiple interwoven narratives — as Santiago tries to understand how his father was involved with the dictatorship, and what happened to Ambrosio, and how the regime pervaded every level of Peruvian society. A dense, powerful, and formally innovative novel about the relationship between political corruption and personal moral failure.
What is The Feast of the Goat about?
The Feast of the Goat (2000) is set in the Dominican Republic during the final days of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo ('the Goat'), who ruled the country from 1930 to his assassination in 1961. The novel follows three parallel narratives: Urania, a Dominican woman who returns to Santo Domingo after thirty years in New York to visit her dying father; the conspirators who planned and carried out the assassination; and Trujillo himself in the last day of his life. It is Vargas Llosa's most historically detailed and most emotionally devastating novel — a portrait of what absolute power does to a society and the individuals within it.
