Mario Vargas Llosa, unchallenged literary figure shaped by authoritarianism

Although many miles away from our country, the influence of Latin American countries on the three subjects that Malayalis love the most is beyond what other countries in the world can claim. They are revolution, literature and football! The names of the heroes of those countries in these three fields are familiar even to our children. We get excited when we talk about the Bolivian jungles. We have embraced the lives of Che Guevara and Castro like characters in folk tales. In the field of football, the name Maradona is still a symbol of the magic of surprising and deceiving the defence lines with movements reminiscent of dance steps and moving the net with the football. Messi, Neymar and others are no different.

In the literary field, the most profound influence on Malayali intellect after Russian literature was probably Latin American literature. In modern times, the influence of writers like Pablo Neruda, Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez has greatly enriched our literary thoughts. Mario Vargas Llosa became known among Malayalis after Marquez. However, there is a large community of readers in Kerala today who prefer Llosa's writing to Marquez. Both are Nobel Prize winners. Although Marquez is ahead in terms of world fame, Llosa is a writer who is second to none in terms of the structure and tact of his writing and the clarity shown in the expression of ideas.

Most of Llosa's writings are devoted to analyzing the psychology of dictatorship. Few writers have depicted how democracy can slip into dictatorship as aesthetically and insightfully as Llosa has. Llosa's works became universal because they accurately depicted the transformation of a person who enters politics with the desire to do good for the people through democracy into a totalitarian who hates and fears the people. Llosa was able to portray this degradation of the human mind, which has happened in the past, is happening in the present, and will happen in the future, with frightening realism.

A single work, "The Feast of the Goat," based on the assassination of Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, is enough for Llosa to sit unchallenged in one of the leading chairs of world writers. The style of writing in that work is such that the reader becomes a member of a small group that plots to assassinate the dictator and ultimately carries it out. Llosa, the author of such excellent novels as The Time of the Hero, The Fish in the Water, The War for the End of the World, and The Way to Paradise, has left this world at the age of eighty-nine. Although Llosa writes about the lives of the people of Peru, where he was born, the departure of this storyteller who was able to transform it into a story of hope, despair, pain, anger, lust, food, helplessness, and finally death, is a story that will be remembered in world literature. The emptiness is not small.