The Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa has recently been in the spotlight as much for his personal life as for his work.
The 87-year-old Peruvian’s separation from the Spanish socialite Isabel Preysler and his reconciliation with Patricia Llosa, his cousin and former wife, appear to have caught the public imagination.
But now Vargas Llosa, hailed by some as one of the greatest living authors and the Hispanic world’s most celebrated living intellectual, has announced that he has written his last novel. “I’m saying goodbye to the novel because I am 87 years old and I cannot imagine that these stories, which take three or four years to construct, can be approached with all the rigour necessary at this stage of my life,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
He first made the valedictory statement in a note in the final pages of his latest novel, Le Dedico Mi Silencio, which could be translated as I Tender My Silence. Before its publication in Madrid, where the author has lived since the 1990s, he told La Vanguardia, another Spanish newspaper: “That was a note I made for myself, a thought, and I never intended it to be an announcement, but they suggested leaving it and that’s it.”
Vargas Llosa, awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2010, is also an acclaimed essayist and journalist. He said that he would not be giving up other forms of writing. “Now I am committed to writing something essayistic about Sartre, who had a lot of influence at a stage in my life,” he stated. “I will keep on writing until the last day of my life.”
Advertisement
Starting his writing career at 15 as a crime reporter, he emerged as a literary force in the 1960s as part of the “boom” or “new wave” of Latin American writers. He rose to international fame with novels such as The Time of the Hero and built on his reputation with masterpieces such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
Politically he has swung from the left in the 1970s, when he was a supporter of Fidel Castro, to the right from the 1980s, when he ran as a presidential candidate in Peru, heading a conservative party.
The cause of a spat with his friend Gabriel García Márquez, whom he punched in the face, remains a mystery but the two made up after years of silence. More recently the end of his relationship with Preysler, 72, has played out in the Spanish media, where the two former lovers have exchanged barbs.
Preysler, a Spanish-Filipina television presenter whose first husband was the singer Julio Iglesias, declared that Vargas Llosa’s “behaviour has left a lot to desire” and called his last novel “a drag”.
In 2015 Vargas Llosa left Patricia Llosa, 78, his wife of 50 years, for Preysler, but friends said that the author and the socialite were always incompatible.
Advertisement
The writer has confined himself to remarking: “Ours are two very different worlds, very separate. I was very in love with Isabel. But let’s say, that world is not my world. I am back in my house, surrounded by my books.”
His last novel is dedicated: “To Patricia.”
