Scourge of dictators and utopians

THE literary reputation of Mario Vargas Llosa was established early in his prolific career. The Nobel prize for literature, bestowed on him this year, would have been deserved two decades or more ago. But back then the award would have been deplored by many Latin Americans who liked his novels but not his politics. For not only is Mr Vargas Llosa Latin America's most accomplished living writer, he is also a thinker who battles for democracy, the market economy and individual liberty.

While his views have modulated over the years, their core has been constant ever since the mid-1960s, when he shook off a youthful enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution. Not long ago his was a brave and lonely stance for a Latin American intellectual. The widespread, if not universal, approval of the award in the region suggests that he is winning the argument.

In its citation the Swedish committee commended Mr Vargas Llosa for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.” This describes well two of his finest novels, written more than three decades apart. “Conversation in the Cathedral”, an early work of astonishing maturity, is set in his native Peru in the 1950s, during a dictatorship. “The Feast of the Goat”, published in 2000, explores the cruel regime of General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. They are subtle studies of the psychology of power and its corruption of human integrity. (He returns to such themes in his new novel, “El Sueño del Celta”, about Roger Casement, an Anglo-Irish diplomat and early crusader for human rights, out in Spanish next month.)

The flip side of dictatorship in Latin America has been a recurrent search for Utopia. This is liberating when pursued as an artistic vision, but leads to bloodshed, disaster and tragedy when it becomes a political project. That is the implicit conclusion of a string of Mr Vargas Llosa's books (such as “The War of the End of the World”, “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” and “The Way to Paradise”).

Paradoxically, perhaps, for a man of passions, he is unfailingly courteous and possessed of a disciplined work ethic, rising early every morning to write for several hours. His extraordinarily versatile output of more than 50 books includes comic and erotic novels and literary criticism, as well as a fortnightly newspaper column for Spain's El País.

While Mr Vargas Llosa's prose lacks the poetic intensity of Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, who won the prize in 1982, he more than makes up for this by his greater intellectual depth, subtlety and authorial rigour. His work is meticulously researched and carefully crafted.

Mr García Márquez has a house in Cuba, is a friend of Fidel Castro and espouses a Latin American nationalism. Such causes are anathemas to Mr Vargas Llosa. He abhors Mr Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, as he does Chile's General Pinochet (“a killer and a thief”) and Alberto Fujimori, Peru's corrupt conservative ex-strongman. His liberalism is universal, inspired by such thinkers as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. He hates nationalism, seeing it as a tool of demagogues; similarly he has criticised Bolivia's Evo Morales, who claims to be leading a revolution on behalf of his country's indigenous peoples, for turning race into a collectivist political tool (Mr Morales, along with Cuba's government, was among the few to criticise the award).

But Mr Vargas Llosa is far from being a standard-bearer of the right. He criticised the invasion of Iraq (but later concluded it was worth overthrowing Saddam Hussein) and Israel's war on Lebanon in 2006. He has often expressed sympathy for moderate centre-left governments. In Spain, where he lives for part of the year, he backs a small centrist party that opposes the petty nationalisms of the country's periphery.

In the Latin American tradition he believes that it is the writer's role—and duty—to intervene in politics. He went farther than most. Fearing that Peruvian democracy was threatened by bank nationalisation and Maoist terrorism, he stood for the presidency in 1990. He lost (to Mr Fujimori). Once a polarising figure in Peru, he is now widely respected as his country's conscience. That is increasingly true across Latin America.