(Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist and journalist and 2010 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, passed away last April 13 at the age of 89. Below, a Filipino writer recalls her encounters with Vargas Llosa during the literary giant’s visits to Manila.)
How come when an author, whose books you have followed through the decades, dies, it feels like a massive blow to your chest? Your eyes swell with tears. You are reduced into a snotty fool, shaking your head and wondering if the magic he had spawned will ever be repeated or could be matched by the next bright light in literature. If anything, this shows how powerful a hold the great authors have on our imaginations.
Two covers of the Nobel laureate novels
That was what Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s death felt like to me when I happened upon a small announcement while scrolling down my Facebook feed. I counter-checked and confirmed the basic information given. Yes, his children themselves gave the death notice on April 13, 2025.
When Simone de Beauvoir died, coincidentally on April 14, 1986, I was so upset that I had to rise from my seat at the office and rush to the toilet to wipe the tears from my eyes. I could only share my grief with my colleague, Amadis Ma. Guerrero, who apologized that he hadn’t read any of the works of this existentialist writer.
She had been my companion the entire summer of 1984 after I purchased her series of memoirs when I had a windfall. From Erehwon Bookstore in Makati, I brought home, or wherever I found myself, these books and read them in sequence: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance. Much later, it was Adieux, about the last years of her lover, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Right after college, I was enamored with her novel The Mandarins, a gift from Chicago-based friend and collage artist Ogot Sumulong and highly recommended by my Stylistics professor, Nieves Epistola. The characters were thinly veiled—I could point out who were De Beauvoir, Sartre, even Albert Camus in a work of fiction.
But I’m drifting again. I just want to emphasize how writers of the Vargas Llosa and De Beauvoir caliber occupy our minds and hearts, especially if you dive into their good stuff. I felt privileged (and small and insignificant, having not built a body of work) when I met him in the mid-’70s. He was the guest of honor at an international PEN conference (PEN is short for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Novelists), sponsored by the local chapter headed by F. Sionil Jose and held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Main Gallery.
Martial law was fully enforced at that time, but for a brief spell it felt like censorship was lifted as one speaker after another spoke on the freedom that allowed for the imagination to roam. If then managing editor of the Daily Express Neal H. Cruz hadn’t assigned me to cover the event for the news pages, I’d still have gone there by myself out of curiosity.
Vargas Llosa’s words are lost to my poor memory, although everything was taped by the CCP, so his remarks may still be in the file of cassette tapes stored at the library. As for the front-page story my report merited—that, too, is lost to time. I don’t keep hard copies of my reports and just hope I can revisit old words at the National Library while my health is fairly intact.
What I recall of the Peruvian writer was his lack of fluency in English that made him stop, mid-speech, raise his hands, and in frustration, cry out, “This terrible language!” The audience, made up mostly of Filipino writers from different provinces and regions, laughed in sympathy.
That same day at lunch, Daily Express contributing writer Rosalinda L. Orosa went up to him and engaged him in an animated conversation in his native Spanish. The tension on his face eased a bit.
Vargas Llosa with officials of the De La Salle University in Manila in 2016
I would see him again in 2016 or more than 40 years later, when he visited his amour Isabel Preysler’s home country to receive an honorary doctorate in the humanities from De La Salle University in Manila. Protocol was stricter, unlike before when you could just go up to him to clarify something he had said. By this time he had a Nobel prize for literature, something of a curse, as he said in interviews.
Isabel Preysler, Cecile Licad and Vargas Llosa (Courtesy of Cecile Licad)
He was 80 years old already, but he still looked virile and held hands tightly with Ms. Preysler wherever they walked. It wasn’t for support or for balance. I imagined it was passion in the winter of his life.
He talked of time spent with the La Salle brothers in his childhood and youth and credited them for teaching him how to read and write. He cited the Spaniard brother named Justiano for “the most important event in my life”—learning how to read.
He spoke extemporaneously, calling reading “a magical operation” that transformed the letters of a book into “images and a living experience.” He felt his world enriched and transformed. Each time he discovered a book, reading remained magical.
He said he respected the invented life created by writers. His role as storyteller was born in those early years “as a result of the extraordinary pleasure I had in reading.” But Peru then had a limited literary life so his “vocation wasn’t integrated with life. I felt eccentric and marginalized.” He was consecrating days, months, years to his writing with great difficulty in finding a publisher, “but I persevered.”
Little do people know that he supported both his studies and writing by taking on assorted jobs, among them as a radio man and a journalist for Agence France Presse. This was something he shared with another Nobel laureate from Latin America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose roots were in journalism.
Vargas Llosa said writing has fulfilled his life “in an extraordinary way,” and at the same time added that “it is difficult to demonstrate how books change the lives of readers for the better. Sensibilities, desires are stimulated. This shows the importance of books in daily life. Good books are the best defense against prejudices, distorted views of people in different languages.”
Vargas Llosa said writing has fulfilled his life ‘in an extraordinary way,’ and at the same time added that ‘it is difficult to demonstrate how books change the lives of readers for the better’
Despite these differences, the common denominator that is of utmost importance, he said, “is we are all humans challenged by the same obstacles” in order to continue to live.
By reading good stories, he said, “we make more accessible to us certain values” like the “freedom needed for societies to become modern and prosperous. Good books develop in us a kind of dissatisfaction with the world as it is. We hope that life will change, that we create societies that are more fair and nearer the worlds we create with our imagination.”
Vargas Llosa said he was convinced that reading good literature “is not only a great pleasure, but also fundamental for the training of citizens in free and democratic societies.”
He warned, “All regimes that try to control human life have suspicions about literature. They try to control this activity and eliminate spontaneity. Dictatorships are literature’s natural enemy.”
He praised reading and writing of good books for helping “develop natural criticism of the world as it is.” He bemoaned how for some sectors of society, literature is considered as “just entertainment.” Society pressures the youth to go into what he called “practical skills”
Yes, he agreed that literature remains “the best entertainment but at the same time, it is a kind of knowledge of the world. Literature is able to make us feel we are having living experiences.”
Through literature, he continued, “we enter into an intimacy with a culture, know the most secret personality of persons.”
Reading, he concluded, is not just for pleasure but also for the shaping of “better citizens to face the challenges in our existence.”
He thanked the DLSU for the honorary degree and quipped, “I will try my best not to deceive you.”
Vargas Llosa signing a book for writer Amadis Ma. Guerrero
A merienda followed in one of the university function rooms, while a cordon sanitaire kept people away from the guest of honor. I wouldn’t have that. Amadis was in the same room, clutching a pocketbook edition of a Vargas Llosa novel, dog-eared and its pages already browning in color. I dragged him to the author’s table, then I introduced myself as a reporter of a martial law regime newspaper in the Seventies sent to cover him.
His mouth formed an “Oh,” then he said he remembered that “terrible period when there was no freedom.” I had no book for him to sign—all were stored in Baguio. So I presented Amadis, who started to converse with him in Spanish and sought his autograph.
Some Vargas Llosa novels
After we had done that, a slew of other writers followed us, asking for his autograph and having their pictures taken with him. He obliged graciously. He left me with a picture of him and my friend huddled over a book and whispering in the language of Cervantes.
(Some quotes are taken from the author’s report, originally published by VeraFiles.org)
