Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin review – the Peruvian leftist who fell in love with Margaret Thatcher

This stylish biography of the author traces his journey from left to right, and from ‘posh Lima’ to Cricklewood “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Those words on the opening page of Conversation in the Cathedral announced the arrival of a writer who understood that national history could become the organising principle of fiction.

At precisely the moment when Latin America was discovering the intoxicating possibilities of magical realism – a form whose exuberance had an elective affinity with revolutionary politics, collapsing the distinction between the marvellous and the possible – Mario Vargas Llosa plumped for old-fashioned realism instead.

It was a question of sensibility as much as politics, Gerald Martin suggests in this chatty yet coolly analytical biography.

He traces the path of a novelist who began by dissecting oligarchy with surgical precision and ended happily dining among its ranks, completing one of literary history’s most spectacular political migrations – from the hard left to the hard right, over the course of half a century.

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  Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin review – the Peruvian leftist who fell in love with Margaret Thatcher