The Great Neoliberal Novelist (Geoff Shullenberger, April 15, 2025, Compact)
In his early career, Vargas Llosa was a left-wing radical, and he wrote Conversation in a period when he was being regularly fêted in Fidel Castro’s Havana. Yet it is clear from the moral complexity and tragic sensibility of this and other novels that he never found such answers satisfying. To be sure, he never shied away from any of the dark facts of his country’s history. For instance, The Green House (1966), the novel he wrote before Conversation, depicts the kidnapping of indigenous children by Christian missionaries and the brutally exploitative rubber trade in the Amazon. But he refused to portray Peru and Peruvians as mere victims of foreign exploitation, or as anything but the agents of their own destiny.
Given this deeply held sensibility, his break with the Latin American left was probably foreordained. Its precipitating event was what we would now call the “cancellation” of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who in 1971 was accused by the official national writers’ union of “exalting individualism in opposition to … collective demands” and promptly jailed by Castro. This led Vargas Llosa to organize an open letter protesting Padilla’s treatment. In the aftermath, he fell out with many of his fellow writers and intellectuals, most notably with his former close friend (and eventual fellow Nobel laureate) Gabriel García Márquez.
If Vargas Llosa’s early rebellion against the stifling mores of the Peruvian haute bourgeoisie had prompted him to embrace Marxism and the Cuban Revolution, his later rejection of the groupthink of Latin American intelligentsia led him to a new set of lodestars: Popper, Hayek, and Thatcher. While the political essays that resulted from this conversion often amounted to a rehashing of “classical-liberal” nostrums, the same can’t be said of the novels that marked his neoliberal turn: The War at the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984) number among his greatest achievements, and among the finest political fiction of the past century.
Both novels deal with failed revolutions: the first with the real historical events of the Canudos War in late 19th century Brazil, where a messianic sect of peasants revolted against the newly proclaimed republic; the second, a fictionalized version of an abortive communist revolution in 1950s Peru. Both stories expose the deep disjunction between elites and the masses in Latin America. In War at the End of the World, Brazil’s progressive reformers are shocked to find that many of the rural poor they hope to lift out of backwardness view their secular republic as a blasphemous abomination and prefer a restoration of monarchy; in Mayta, a hapless urban intellectual leads a doomed uprising of Andean peasants, in a tragicomic foreshadowing of the horrors of the Shining Path war that was tearing Peru apart as Vargas Llosa was writing the novel.
The author faced his own real-life version of the same disconnect when he ran for president of Peru in 1990. His highbrow neoliberal reformist platform, derived from his first-hand observations of Thatcher’s England and readings of Hayek and Friedman, failed to win out over the wily populist appeals of the outsider candidate Alberto Fujimori. Ironically, after his victory Fujimori went on to implement much of his rival’s proposed economic program of shock therapy and privatization, while also installing himself as dictator and engaging in staggering levels of corruption and violence. Nonetheless, decades later Fujimori retains enough of a mass following to this day that his daughter Keiko will be a leading contender in Peru’s next presidential election.