Making Waves: Essays by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York. 1997. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374200386. Translated from the Spanish by John King. 338 pages. hardcover. Front jacket art: Mario Vargas Llosa, by Botero. Jacket design by Michael Ian Kaye.
DESCRIPTION - Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned as a novelist, is one of our most brilliant and provocative public intellectuals as well. In Making Waves, the first collection of his essays, he explores, with characteristic brio and elegance, his long-standing preoccupations-literature and politics, Europe and the Americas, and the relations among them all. We follow Vargas Llosa from his native Peru to Madrid and then to Paris, the setting of essays on his great precursors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as a comic account of his visit to the tomb of Rin Tin Tin and an affecting memoir of his time in the city as an aspiring writer in the 1960s. In passionately critical essays on the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, Vargas Llosa takes up vital questions of Latin American independence, while in essays on Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, and Julio Cortázar-and in an exchange with Günter Grass-he ponders magic realism. In more recent articles, he considers the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori-and the failures of the English public-school system, which made his son into a Rastafarian. The essays in Making Waves are full of Mario Vargas Llosa's unflagging literary intensity and moral and political integrity. They are an important addition to the body of work of this major international writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world. Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a liberal and held anti–left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru with the centre-right Democratic Front coalition in the 1990 election, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by the Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie Française.
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