Gerald Martin, the biographer of Gabriel García Márquez, has published a new biography of Mario Vargas Llosa titled "Mario Vargas Llosa, A Life," released by Bloomsbury. The English print edition has been in bookstores for less than a week, according to Peruvian writer Mirko Lauer.
The book runs 848 pages and took Martin 15 years to write, a period stretched by his thoroughness and by delays tied to Vargas Llosa's age and final illnesses. A Kindle e-book edition in English is due in November for $31, and a Spanish translation has been announced for this semester.
Some consider "Mario Vargas Llosa, la invención de una realidad," published by Barral Editores in Barcelona in 1970, to be the first biography of the writer, though many view it instead as an early critical study.
Reviews and reactions
Early reviewers have taken the book seriously. Pratinav Avil, writing in The Guardian, described it as a talkative yet coldly analytical biography tracing a novelist who began by dissecting the oligarchy with surgical precision and ended up dining happily among its members, according to Lauer.
Avil wrote that the book goes beyond stories of political shirt-changes, famous literary fistfights or romances destined to become books, and noted that Martin restores the women Vargas Llosa reduced to the condition of literary raw material.
Lauer said Martin interviewed him at length early in the 15-year project and that he found him highly thorough and notably impartial toward his controversial subject. Lauer added that writer José Miguel Oviedo had been a close friend within Vargas Llosa's Lima circle, whereas Martin approached the subject as a biographer.
