Many of the world’s eyes this past week have been fixed on the Vatican and the leadup to Saturday’s papal funeral, an event that overshadowed most of the rest of the news cycle, at least in Catholic land. But Pope Francis was not the only famous Latin American whose recent death was a source of mourning and reflection: Just a week before the pontiff’s death, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa died on April 13, 2025. He was 89 years old.
The Peruvian government ordered flags across the country to be flown at half-mast at the news, declaring April 14 a day of national mourning. But Vargas Llosa seemed to want simplicity even more than Pope Francis; his funeral was a private family affair and his body was cremated. It was a quiet sendoff for a Nobel Prize laureate, a winner of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Spanish-language literature, the former president of PEN International and a one-time candidate for president of Peru.
Born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up in Bogota, Colombia, and Lima, Peru. He enrolled in military school at age 14 (a time that formed the basis for his first novel, The Time of the Hero) and began working as a journalist at the age of 16; his experiences as a reporter formed the basis for another book, Conversation in the Cathedral. He eventually authored more than 30 works of fiction, nonfiction and plays. In addition to the two above, his most famous novels include The Green House (1966), The War of the End of the World (1981) and Feast of the Goat (2000).
Vargas Llosa was long identified with El Boom, an explosion of popularity and prominence for Latin American authors in the 1960s and 1970s that included Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Julio Cortázar of Argentina and Vargas Llosa’s longtime frenemy Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. Vargas Llosa often cited European and American authors like Flaubert and Faulkner as important influences, and became himself a personal favorite of John Updike in later decades.
Though originally identified with the political left at home in Peru and abroad, Vargas Llosa broke with many of his Latin American literary contemporaries over the years and embraced many politically conservative themes, including free trade, privatization of government assets and fiscal austerity. He ran for president of Peru in 1990 against Alberto Fujimori, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory after leading for most of the race. Vargas Llosa moved to Spain soon after, eventually writing a column for the Spanish daily El Pais.
America reviewed a number of Vargas Llosa’s novels over the years (though you may have never read him in any Catholic school; he was quite the aficionado of the erotic scene), particularly once his star was in the ascendant in the United States after Conversation in the Cathedral was translated into English. In a 1982 review of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Gerard Reedy, S.J., wrote that “Vargas Llosa does for Lima what Dickens did for London and Joyce for Dublin: transform the various neighborhoods of his native city into realities symbolic of moral and religious values.”
Not all the reviewers liked his politics as the years went on: The 1997 reviewer of Death in the Andes submitted that “Mario Vargas Llosa wrote better books when he was a man of the left.”
To call Vargas Llosa a political conservative in the American sense would be a misnomer, of course; one can’t just map the categories of U.S. politics onto a Latin American world of profoundly different cultural and social realities. I first encountered Vargas Llosa in a class in graduate school with translator nonpareilEdith Grossman on “Latin American Dictators” (seriously, we just discussed novels about Latin American dictators, things got dark), where we read Feast of the Goat. No one can encounter that novel—set in the final days of the regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo—and imagine the author finding any common cause with Donald Trump, for example. A primary theme of Vargas Llosa’s writings was always the perilous fate of democratic societies when confronted by political strongmen.
“Vargas Llosa has been a political activist all his life, shifting from left to right with his ideas, but certain themes hold: opposition to dictators and the exploitation of the weak and poor throughout the world,” wrote former America literary editor Raymond Schroth, S.J., in a 2014 review of Dream of the Celt, Vargas Llosa’s fictionalized biography of the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement. “Vargas Llosa, a Nobel Prize winner in literature in 2010, remains a moralist committed to justice.”
Vargas Llosa, an agnostic for most of his life, nevertheless twice wrote about an unexpected subject: Pope Benedict XVI. The day before Pope Benedict’s abdication became official in 2013, Vargas Llosa wrote in El Pais (reprinted in translation in the National Catholic Reporter) that Benedict wasn’t quite the doctrinal rottweiler he was sometimes made out to be. While calling him “an anachronism within the anachronism” in an often-biting evaluation, he nevertheless praised the pope as “a man of the library and of the lecture hall, of reflection and study, surely one of the most intelligent and cultured popes that the Catholic Church has had in all her history.”
Further, he wrote, Benedict “thought with depth and originality, based on his enormous theological, philosophical, historical, and literary knowledge,” and his “books and encyclicals often went beyond the strictly dogmatic and contained novel and bold insights concerning moral, cultural, and existential problems of our time.”
Two years before, in a reflection for El Pais on the occasion of World Youth Day in Madrid, Vargas Llosa called Benedict “one of the rare pontiffs whose encyclicals and books can be read without yawning, even by agnostics like me,” and even, as Santiago Ramos noted recently in Commonweal, affected a curiously wistful tone for the faith of his childhood: “Believers and unbelievers should be happy that in these days in Madrid, God seemed to exist, Catholicism seemed to be the only and true religion.”
Benedict’s successor didn’t list Vargas Llosa among his favorites: Borges owned that honor (at least it wasn’t García Márquez, whom Vargas Llosa once punched in the face at a film premiere, resulting in quite the shiner). But Pope Francis and Vargas Llosa did lead parallel lives in some respects, as the journalist Nicolás Boullosa noted after Francis’ death—and not just because they died a week apart at almost the same age. Both were Latin Americans who studied in Europe, both became embroiled in the complicated and sometimes brutal political and social realities of their home countries and both ended up back in Europe despite it all—Vargas Llosa in Madrid for many years and Pope Francis in Rome for a dozen.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s obituaries offer a reminder that he outlived almost all his literary and political contemporaries, in Peru and around the world. But until the end of his life, he continued to offer blunt but straightforward takes on contemporary life in fiction and nonfiction alike. Here is a snippet from his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, words of advice that feel all the more important 15 years later:
We should not allow ourselves to be intimidated by those who want to snatch away the freedom we have been acquiring over the long course of civilization. Let us defend the liberal democracy that, with all its limitations, continues to signify political pluralism, coexistence, tolerance, human rights, respect for criticism, legality, free elections, alternation in power, everything that has been taking us out of a savage life and bringing us closer—though we will never attain it—to the beautiful, perfect life literature devises, the one we can deserve only by inventing, writing, and reading it.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Organist,” by Laura Trimble. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
Pat Conroy: ‘I left the Church but she has not left me.’
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
