Mario Vargas Llosa Books In Order

The Time of the Hero

A powerful social satire which outraged the authorities of the author’s native Peru, where 1000 copies were publicly burned.

The Green House

Mario Vargas Llosa’s classic early novel takes place in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, setting in motion a chain reaction with extraordinary consequences.

This brothel, called The Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute; Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both excitement and escape.

The conflicting forces that haunt The Green House evoke a world balanced between savagery and civilization and one that is cursed by not being able to discern between the two.

Conversation in the Cathedral

A Haunting tale of power, corruption, and the complex search for identity Conversation in the Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odr a. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town. Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, Conversation in the Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.

Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

This delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru’s Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side splitting complications arise as world of Captain Pantoja’s remarkable achievements start to spread.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterful, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author’s youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city’s listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane. Interweaving the story of Marito’s life with the ever more fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa’s novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

The War of the End of the World

Deep within the remote backlands of nineteenth century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost. In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa tells his own version of the real story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an astute psychological portrait of a modern revolutionary and a searching account of an old friend’s struggle to understand him. First published in English in 1986, the novel probes the long and checkered history of radical politics in Latin America.

Who Killed Palomino Molero?

This wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the scene of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the commanding officer of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth. Who Killed Palomino Molero?, an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery, takes up one of Vargas Llosa’s characteristic themes: the despair at how hard it is to be an honest man in a corrupt society.

The Storyteller

At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man…
that The Storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas’s transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man’s journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both.

In Praise of the Stepmother

With meticulous observation and the seductive skill of a great storyteller, Vargas Llosa lures the reader into the shadow of perversion that, little by little, darkens the extraordinary happiness and harmony of his characters. The mysterious nature of happiness and above all, the corrupting power of innocence are the themes that underlie these pages, and the author has perfectly met the demands of the erotic novel, never dimming for an instant the fine poetic polish of his writing.

Death in the Andes

In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tom’s have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tom s entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men. Death in the Andes is an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world’s great novelists.

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

A companion to the scandalous bestseller In Praise of the Stepmother, Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel is ‘an amazingly seductive work’ San Francisco Chronicle. The boundary between physical reality and the imagination has been at the heart of literature in Spanish ever since Don Quixote. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, his most generous and ambitious novel in years, Mario Vargas Llosa draws on that tradition to explore the possibilities of imagination in our own time. Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle: Don Rigoberto himself, by day a gray insurance executive, by night a po*rnographer and sexual enthusiast; his second wife, Lucrecia; and his young son, Alfonso. Husband and wife are estranged because of a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and the boy, a fey, angelic creature who may have seduced her rather than the other way around. Missing Lucrecia terribly, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies, and unsent letters; meanwhile the boy visits Lucrecia, determined to regain her favor and win her love. The resulting novel, an intoxicating mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling. ‘Exuberant…
a roguish and sophisticated sex comedy.’ Time

The Feast of the Goat

A Library Journal Best BookVargas Llosa’s vivid historical portrait of a regime of fear and its aftermathIt is 1961. The Dominican Republic languishes under economic sanctions; the Catholic church spurs its clergy against the government; from its highest ranks down, the country is arrested in bone chilling fear. In The Feast of the Goat Vargas Llosa unflinchingly tells the story of a regime’s final days and the unsteady efforts of the men who would replace it. His narrative skates between the rituals of the hated dictator, Rafael Trujillo, in his daily routine, and the laying in wait of the assasins who will kill him; their initial triumph; and the shock of fear’s release and replacements. In the novel’s final chapters we learn Urania Cabral’s story, self imposed exile whose father was Trujillo’s cowardly Secretary of State. Drawn back to the country of her birth from 30 years after Trujillo’s assasination, the widening scope of the dictator’s cruelty finds expression in her story, and a rapt audience in her extended family. In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa weighs the burden of a corrupt and corruptive regime upon the people who live beneath it. This is a moving portrait of an unrepentant dictator and the unwilling citizens drawn into his orbit.

The Way to Paradise

The dramatic lives of two bold, independent adventurers Paul Gaugin and his grandmother Flora Tristan, a trail blazing women’s suffragist as imagined by ‘one of the master storytellers of our time’ Chicago Tribune Book WorldIn 1844, Flora Trist n embarked on a tour of France to campaign for workers’ and women’s rights. In 1891, her grandson Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti, determined to escape civilization and paint primitive masterpieces. Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this deft, utterly absorbing novel. Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return, she makes her name as a popular writer and a champion of the downtrodden, setting herself the arduous task of touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers’ Union. Paul, struggling painter and stubborn visionary, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works. Affectionate, astute, and quietly caustic, this double portrait is a rare study in passion and ambition, as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death, from Mario Vargas Llosa, whose previous novels, The Feast of the Goat, ‘pushed the boundaries of the traditional historic novel in a book of harrowing power and lasting resonance’ The New York Times.

The Bad Girl

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as ‘Lily’ in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting ‘Comrade Arlette,’ an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit n icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the ily of years gone by. Whoever The Bad Girl turns up as whether t’s Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high ranking UNESCO fficial, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. The protean Lily, gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear’s what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate hadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In MarioVargas Llosa’s beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

The Cubs and Other Stories

The Cubs and Other Stories is Mario Vargas Llosa’s only volume of short fiction available in English. Vargas Llosa s domain is the Peru of male youth and machismo, where life s dramas play themselves out on the soccer field, the dance floor, and on street corners. The title story, The Cubs, tells the story of the carefree boyhood of P.P. Cuellar and his friends, and of P.P. s bizarre accident and tragic coming of age. Innovative in style and technique, it is a work of both physical and psychic loss. In a candid and perceptive forward to this collection of early writing, Vargas llosa provides background to the volume and a unique glimpse into the mind of the Nobel Prize winning artist.

Book Of Latin American Plays

A collection of extraordinary, playable translations from across the Latin American continent, including a new Mario Vargas Llosa playIn La Chunga by Mario Vargas Llosa a young gambler down on his luck lends his girlfriend to the lady bar keeper for the night to pay off a debt. Four years later the girl has neither been seen nor heard of, and the gamblers meet to speculate on the events of that fateful night. In Paper Flowers by Egon Wolff, Eva, a lonely middle class woman puts up a tramp for the night out of the kindness of her heart, only to find that he intends to occupy her life as well as her house, reducing her once and for all to his state. Medea in the Mirror by Jos Triana is an extraordinary re setting of the Medea story in the Cuban revolution of 1959. As Maria, a young mulatto takes her revenge on Julian for abandoning her for someone else the play becomes a mirror for the events that took place when Castro ousted the Batista regime.

The Perpetual Orgy

The book’s first section is a tete a tete with Emma Bovary; the second traces the gestation and birth of the novel, as well as Flaubert’s method, his mania for documentation, and the novel’s literary sources; the third situates it in literary history. Vargas Llosa’s first work of non fiction will send the reader back to Flaubert’s masterpiece with renewed interest.

A Writer’s Reality

Eight informal essays by the acclaimed author of In Praise of the Stepmother unravel the evolution and background of six of his favorite novels. A witty and candid intellectual work in which Llosa offers both an artistic autobiography and his reflections on the creative process.

A Fish in the Water

Vargas Llosa an author, a politician, and a man with fascinating insight into his own life tells the story of his run for the presidency of his native Peru in 1990 and his ultimate defeat by a political unknown. Weaving the story of his run for office with the story of his journey as a man, Vargas Llosa creates a complete and complex picture of a figure whose real story is just beginning.

Making Waves

Spanning thirty years of writing, Making Waves traces the development of the Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa’s thinking on politics and culture, and shows the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, and the terrorism of Peru s Shining Path; brilliant engagements with towering figures of literature such as Joyce, Faulkner, and Sartre; and observations about the dog cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt s knife, and the failures of the English public school system.

Letters to a Young Novelist

A literary apprenticeship in eleven letters, by the internationally acclaimed master of the novel In the tradition of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Mario Vargas Llosa condenses a lifetime of writing, reading, and thought into an essential manual for aspiring writers, revealing in the process his deepest beliefs about our common literary endeavor. A writer, in his view, is a being seized by an insatiable appetite for creation, a rebel, and a dreamer. But dreams, when set down on paper, require disciplined development, and so Vargas Llosa undertakes to supply the tools of transformation. Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe Borges, Bierce, C line, Cort zar, Faulkner, Kafka, Robbe Grillet he lays bare the inner workings of fiction, examining time, space, style, and structure, all the while urging young novelists not to lose touch with the elemental urge to create. Conversational, eloquent, and effortlessly erudite, this little book is destined to be read and reread by young writers, old writers, would be writers, and all those with a stake in the world of letters.

The Language of Passion

Ten years of world class journalism from one of Latin America’s most influential and controversial men of lettersSince 1977, Mario Vargas Llosa has contributed a biweekly column to Spain s major newspaper, El Pa s. Dubbed Touchstone, and read in syndication by Spanish speaking readers around the globe, the column is renowned in some circles, notorious for skewering the excesses of the Latin American left and championing classic liberalism and free market democracy. In this collection of columns from the 1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of the last decade, including the travails of Latin American democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa s influence is hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob Marley s shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of Carnival in Rio, and examines the legacy of Vermeer, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others. Vargas Llosa is a model of the engaged writer: whatever his subject, he brings to bear the intelligence, wit, tolerance, and moral seriousness that are the hallmark of his nonfiction. The Language of Passion is the work of a cosmopolite in the true sense of the word.

The Temptation of the Impossible

It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it ‘the greatest of all novels.’ Yet today Victor Hugo’s Les Misrables is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In The Temptation of the Impossible, one of the world’s great novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa, helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo’s masterpiece and, in the process, presents a humane vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a different and better world. Hugo, Vargas Llosa says, had at least two goals in Les Misrables to create a complete fictional world and, through it, to change the real world. Despite the impossibility of these aims, Hugo makes them infectious, sweeping up the reader with his energy and linguistic and narrative skill. Les Misrables, Vargas Llosa argues, embodies a utopian vision of literature the idea that literature can not only give us a supreme experience of beauty, but also make us more virtuous citizens, and even grant us a glimpse of the ‘afterlife, the immortal soul, God.’ If Hugo’s aspiration to transform individual and social life through literature now seems innocent, Vargas Llosa says, it is still a powerful ideal that great novels like Les Misrables can persuade us is true.

Andes

In 1995, Pablo Corral Vega began a journey that would take him the entire length of the Andes, the 5,000 mile chain of mountain ranges that extend from Patagonia to the shores of the Caribbean. For Corral Vega, who grew up in the shadow of the mountains in Ecuador, the journey was more than an adventure it was a quest for identity. Corral Vega presents the Andes and South America as a continent of geographic extremes and remarkable human diversity, and his journal entries in which he describes his encounters with the inhabitants of Spanish America who live on the Andes slopes imbue these photographs with even greater depth. Readers are granted rare insight into the peoples who live by the grace of, or despite, the formidable mountain ranges that make up the Andes chain. Inspired by Corral Vega’s photographs, Mario Vargas Llosa, reognized as one of the world s great novelists, offers a lyrical tribute to the mountains he has known since childhood, through reminiscences real and imagined. Vargas Llosa s insights poetic, poignant, and witty are paired with Corral Vega s powerful photography to create a moving and unforgettable taste of one of the most dramatic regions on Earth.

Touchstones

One of Latin America’s greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. ‘Touchstones‘ includes his readings of major twentieth century novels, from ‘Heart of Darkness’ to ‘The Tin Drum and Herzog’ and major works by Hemingway, Woolf, Orwell, Camus and Nabokov. There are long studies of George Grosz, vignettes on Botero and Picasso, and an appreciation of Cezanne and Van Gogh, including a visit to Cezanne’s homes in the South Seas. Also included are essays on political and social thinkers, from the nineteenth century feminist, Flora Tristan, to Isaiah Berlin, and contemporary pieces on 9/11, the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid. Fantastically intelligent, inspired and surprising, ‘Touchstones‘ is a landmark collection from one of the world’s leading intellectuals.

In Praise of Reading and Fiction

On December 7, 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel lLecture is a resounding tribute to fiction’s power to inspire readers to greater ambition, to dissent, and to political action. ‘We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist,’ Vargas Llosa writes. ‘Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute-the foundation of the human condition-and should be better.’ Vargas Llosa’s lecture is a powerful argument for the necessity of literature in our lives today. For, as he eloquently writes, ‘literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression.’