‘A selfish, ignoble person’ – the dark side of the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa
In October 2010, when Gabriel García Márquez, by then suffering from dementia, was told that his former friend and rival had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he enquired: ‘Who is Mario Vargas Llosa?’ This tottering, always compulsive biography of the writer who died last year and which has taken 15 years to write (‘I completely miscalculated its complications’) is Gerald Martin’s valiant answer. ‘Is there a life quite like this one anywhere in the western world in the second half of the 20th century?’ In Martin’s breathless judgment ‘this literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior all rolled into one’ was a single-minded workhorse whose sheer intensity, quality and variety of life was ‘almost literally incredible’.
