Juan Gabriel Vásquez: "Vargas Llosa explored the impact of political forces on the people."

Mario Vargas Llosa dedicated his fiction to exploring the impact of the forces of history and politics on people's private lives, as part of a fundamental generation of writers of the so-called 'boom' who reclaimed for Latin Americans the right to tell their own story in the face of the "falsified" narratives of political power, according to Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez .

Vásquez (1973, Bogotá), who along with other writers participated as a guest in the literary festival Centroamérica Cuenta in Guatemala, pointed out during a talk that through fiction, Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa (1936-2025) " excavated all the mechanisms of our society , of our social and political lives that, in some way, suffer the impact of the forces of the public."

"He dedicated his fiction to exploring that terrain where the forces of history , the forces of politics, invade people's private lives and change them . That's what happens in Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), for example, which for me is one of his two or three great novels," said Vásquez.

The author of The Sound of Things Falling (Alfaguara Prize 2011) added that it is there that the epigraph of Conversation in the Cathedral , which comes from Honoré de Balzac and his work Little Miseries of Married Life (1846), becomes important: "You have to have delved into all of social life to be a true novelist, since the novel is the private history of nations ."

The Colombian novelist observes that this epigraph from Conversation in the Cathedral "could be an epigraph for all of Vargas Llosa's work," and even acknowledges that "it is one of those compasses that helps me orient myself, that has always helped me orient myself in my own fiction."

Thus, Vásquez, with two books of stories under his belt, Los amantes de todos los santos (2008) and Canciones para el incendio (2018), understands fiction as "the area where we tell what official history, what public history does not tell , as the area where official history is keeping quiet, (the way in which) we explore the lies of history or the falsifications of history."

And he states that "this is essential in a country like Peru."

But he immediately corrects himself: "No, no, it's a lie, in a continent like ours, marked by the falsifications of history, the lies of official history, the distortions, the biased versions of our past that political powers try to impose on us, in a continent crossed by official lies as a way of telling the world ."

In that same perspective, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of the novel Historia secreta de Costaguana (2007), points out that Vargas Llosa belonged, along with Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) and Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), to that "fundamental" generation of narrators who were part of the so-called Latin American 'boom'.

With their novels, they " claimed for us, Latin American citizens, the right to tell our own story in the face of the lying or falsified narratives of the political powers, of the dictatorships that swarmed across the continent at that time, of so many interested narrators."

He recalled that "falsified narratives had dominated what we might call the Latin American narrative for decades," but then these booming novels came along "and said no, we Latin American citizens are going to use fiction to reclaim the right to tell our own story."

"So, for all of that, I believe it's a fundamental generation (the Latin American boom) that comes to a close with the death of the youngest of them all, Mario Vargas Llosa," who died at the age of 89 in Lima, Peru, on April 13, he noted.