Many Latin American writers have been tempted to take on a public role, but few have pursued this ambition as far as the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who in 1990 came close to being elected his country’s president. Vargas Llosa, who has died aged 89, owed the possibility of high office almost entirely to his novels, which put him at the forefront of world writers for more than 50 years.
His early works, such as The Green House (1966) or Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), firmly established him as one of the leading authors of what came to be known as the “magical realism” school of writers, although in his case this was often more a question of novelistic technique than of any magical view of his country’s history. He also developed a comic vein most evident in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) that also set him apart from other writers of the so-called “boom” in Latin American fiction.
