"With his death, the last of the Latin American Boom's great stars has gone."

I'm reading "Mario Vargas Llosa: Giant of Latin American literature dies at 89" (BBC).

His first novel, The Time of the Hero, was an indictment of corruption and abuse... based on the writer's own time as a teenager at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which he described in 1990 as "an extremely traumatic experience." His two years there made him see his country "as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition". The school itself burnt 1,000 copies of the novel on its grounds, Vargas Llosa claimed.

His experimental second novel The Green House (1966) was set in the Peruvian desert and jungle, and described an alliance of pimps, missionaries and soldiers based around a brothel.

The two novels helped found the Latin American Boom literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Boom was characterised by experimental and explicitly political works that reflected a continent in turmoil....

"In our conversations, Vargas Llosa declined to discuss his romantic entanglements."

"When I asked him what had fractured his marriage to Patricia Llosa, which produced three children, he dropped all his smiles and chuckles. 'Look,' he said, 'that topic has to do with love. Love is probably the most enriching experience that a human being can have. Nothing transforms a person’s life as much as love. At the same time, love is a private experience. If it’s made public, it becomes cheap, shoddy, full of commonplaces. This is why it’s so hard to write about love in literature. You have to find the most clever ways so that it doesn’t lose its authenticity and become commonplace. So I think that a person shouldn’t talk about love precisely if love is so important in his life.' You’re a romantic, I said. 'I think we all are. I think that romanticism has marked our lives very much, that it’s very difficult not to be romantic in some way, although many of us don’t realize it. You live it or you reject it. You vaccinate yourself against it. Let’s say that I haven’t rejected it. When it’s happened, I’ve lived it.'... [His son] was enormously disappointed when Mario told ¡Hola! that his first year with Preysler had been the happiest year of his life. 'If the year in which you leave your wife of 50 years and you don’t speak to your son is the happiest year of your life... why say it publicly?'"

From "The Elder Statesman of Latin American Literature — and a Writer of Our Moment/Mario Vargas Llosa isn’t a household name among American readers. But at 81, he remains a literary and political colossus across the Spanish-speaking world, and his novels have never felt more relevant" (NYT).

Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize in literature.

His "deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America."

Here's a quote of his about writing:

"The first draft is always very difficult -- a kind of fight against demoralization... I feel I'll never get over the difficulties. What I like most is rewriting. To correct, to suppress, to add, to rebuild the story -- this process is the most exciting for me."

And:

"It's so rewarding to produce this artificial life, which can enrich the life of others."