Fiction and poetry were Mario’s refuge from Ernesto’s domestic despotism. They were also his defiance. “My father saw literature as something extremely dangerous,” Vargas Llosa said in the garden, brushing aside his old traumas with a laugh. “He thought that literature was a passport to failure in life, that it was a way of starving to death.” Novels, Ernesto also believed, were the work of drunk bohemians and homosexuals. Bent on turning Mario into a real man, Ernesto enrolled his son in Leoncio Prado Military Academy when he was 14. “I went to Leoncio Prado because my father thought that the military was the best cure for literature and for those activities that he understood as very marginalized.” Vargas Llosa chuckled at the paradox. “On the contrary, he gave me the subject of my first novel!”

Even now, “The Time of the Hero” (1963) still has the power to shock with its scenes of bullying and dissipation among cadets. Highlights include: the gang rape of a chicken, blow jobs endured for liquor, officers’ kicking students and the killing of a boy nicknamed “Slave,” who marks himself for special humiliation when he makes the mistake of pleading for mercy with clasped hands. Incensed by the exposé, administrators at Leoncio Prado Military Academy rounded up 1,000 copies and set the books aflame in an official ceremony. But a judge for Spain’s prestigious Premio Biblioteca Breve Prize declared it “the best novel in the Spanish language in the past 30 years.” “The Time of the Hero” was among the first sensations of a transformative age of Latin American literature known as the Boom. (All its other major writers — Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Guillermo Cabrera Infante — have died.)

Vargas Llosa’s masterwork is “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969). It’s Faulkner cross-pollinated with Balzac, modernist techniques used to paint a sweeping historical panorama. The structure of the novel spirals out from a single point: an unexpected meeting in 1960s Lima between Santiago Zavala, a 30-year-old reporter estranged from his upper-crust family, and Ambrosio, his family’s former chauffeur. The two run into each other at a pound, where Ambrosio slaughters dogs for money. Together, the men get drunk at a dive bar called the Cathedral, and from their conversation rises a blistering vision of the whole of Peru under Gen. Manuel Odría’s eight-year military dictatorship in the 1950s. Vargas Llosa implicates everyone in the moral catastrophe, from the bickering student dissidents to the cowardly media to the rich women drowning themselves in alcohol and gossip.

It is outrageous that “Conversation in the Cathedral” has never gotten the traction it deserves in the United States, and the novel’s English translation bears some of the blame. Gregory Rabassa — whose stunning translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” helped make that novel an American best seller — stumbles over Vargas Llosa’s more complex style, which shifts continually between the sinuous and the slangy. “Conversation in the Cathedral” will never be an easy read in any language — it’s a book for fans of Faulkner, Proust and Bolaño — but Rabassa’s errors dull its noir patina and obscure its thrilling tonal rapids. The Peruvian-American novelist Daniel Alarcón told me he shoved aside Rabassa’s version when he saw Flaco translated as “Skinny.” “It could have said, ‘Hey, Slim,’ or just kept Flaco,” he pointed out. “But ‘Hey, Skinny’? No one ever says that. That’s not a thing that’s said in human speech in English anywhere that I’ve ever heard. And I’ve been speaking English since I was 3.”

Why has García Márquez’s magical realism cemented its place on American bookshelves and syllabuses while Vargas Llosa’s gritty masterpieces are neglected? Vargas Llosa’s best books are harder to read than García Márquez’s. He’s less sentimental, dirtier, raunchier, angrier. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” looks like a Hallmark card next to “Conversation in the Cathedral.” You might be fired for assigning Vargas Llosa in high school English. And Vargas Llosa has published so many novels — 18 in all — that the tours de force can get lost among the mediocrities. His buttoned-up public demeanor hasn’t helped. “Gabo” was not only a tremendous writer; he was an expert showman who once worked in advertising and cannily played up his Caribbean exoticism for foreign audiences. When the two fell out in the 1970s, many intellectuals leaned left toward García Márquez, while Vargas Llosa was shunned.

Yet Vargas Llosa is the more daring, more democratic writer. While García Márquez cozied up to Fidel Castro and refined a distinctive style, Vargas Llosa reinvented his over and over again while defending free markets and reproductive freedom, gay rights and open elections. His political tracts underscore the value of diversity, of stellar public education, of equal opportunities for the poor. And his novels, whether they are kaleidoscopic histories, political thrillers, generational sagas or slapstick comedies, are remarkable for their ability to inhabit a host of perspectives. He’s especially good at the psychology of collaborators — the people who surround authoritarians and make their administrations function. Such characters were not popular among readers in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, who preferred García Márquez’s romantic heroes, but they might feel especially relevant to Americans today.