Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Laureate, remained a towering figure in the literary world and died this year after a long literary life. I often wonder what his literary career might have been if he had avoided the journalistic journey in his later years and focused instead on his early experimental fiction. The flame of his early work still glows, despite the dilution in his later writings. His shift from dense, structurally ambitious novels to overt political commentary and journalistic fiction seems, in retrospect, like a decision that dimmed rather than deepened his literary glow.
In contrast, consider Leo Tolstoy. After writing Anna Karenina and War and Peace—monuments of psychological and narrative complexity—he drifted away from that path and became a Christian anarchist, writing tracts on moral purity and nonviolence. Even he lost interest in art in his final years. Why, then, did his literary stature never diminish?
The answer lies in the density and depth of those two works, where characters breathe as if with the lungs of history itself. War and Peace is not a novel but a cosmos. Anna Karenina imbibes an emotional texture so deep and vast that a living soul breathes through its pages. It is inexhaustible. By the time Tolstoy put down his pen, he had already entered the pantheon.
Llosa’s early novels—The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter—are undoubtedly brilliant. The narrative experimentation, the dialogue of corruption and memory, the texture of political paralysis—they echo Faulkner, Borges, even Dostoevsky. But they stop just short of that mythic threshold. They are impressive rather than eternal.
When Llosa began to write columns, run for president, and engage in liberal polemics, his fiction began to shift. Later works like The Feast of the Goat or The Bad Girl are finely crafted, but the prose carries the weight of an argument. The ambiguity softened. The characters began to reflect ideas more than contradictions. The fiction, noble in purpose, began to resemble journalism wrapped in narrative clothing.
Tolstoy, too, was preaching in his later years. But he had already planted his fiction in the soil of timelessness. Llosa, in contrast, remained half inside the temple of literature and half outside, in the political square. That divided stance weakened the authority of his fictional voice.
This isn’t to dismiss his later work. It speaks, often eloquently, to justice and freedom. But I sometimes imagine an alternate Vargas Llosa—one who resisted the pull of punditry, who remained deep inside the poetic jungle of The Green House, endlessly rearranging the mirrors of Peru and the soul.
Then, perhaps, his name would not only stand among the literary greats of Latin America but echo beside the giants who made fiction something sacred.