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Paris Review - Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120

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In this interview Mario Vargas Llosa speaks of the inviolable mornings he spends in his office writing, seven days a week. In the fall of 1988, however, he decided to interrupt this otherwise strictly kept schedule to run as the Libertad party candidate for the presidency of Peru. Vargas Llosa has long been outspoken on the subject of Peruvian politics, and has made Peruvian political issues the subject of several of his novels. Yet until the most recent elections he had always resisted suggestions that he run for political office. During the campaign he mentioned his difficulty with the empty emotionalism and rhetoric that are the language of electoral politics. Following the multiparty election, he lost a runoff to Alberto Fujimori on June 10, 1990. Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, a small town in southern Peru. While he was still an infant Vargas Llosa’s parents divorced and he moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia with his mother’s grandparents. In 1945 he returned to Peru,

Interviewed by Ricardo Augusto Setti Issue 116, Fall 1990 Mario Vargas Llosa, ca. 2011. Photograph by Arild Vågen In this interview Mario Vargas Llosa speaks of the inviolable mornings he spends in his office writing, seven days a week. In the fall of 1988, however, he decided to interrupt this otherwise strictly kept schedule to run as the Libertad party candidate for the presidency of Peru. Vargas Llosa has long been outspoken on the subject of Peruvian politics, and has made Peruvian political issues the subject of several of his novels. Yet until the most recent elections he had alwa

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