The following is a tribute to Mario Vargas Llosa by Susan Wilson, an ARTES Trustee, Painter, and Senior Member of The Royal Drawing School. Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist, journalist, and politician, was born on 28th March 1936 and died in Lima on 13th April 2025. As Susan explains Vargas Llosa had a significant influence on Susan’s life and her work as an artist:
‘I was 24 when I landed in Lima from Tahiti, having left NZ for the first time. Lima dazzled me, amazed me, and I could not get enough of the streets, architecture, museums and jirons, where I stayed in the Residential Roma, and ate Brazo gitano daily from a cake shop near the hotel.
Arriving in London, it wasn’t long before I discovered Vargas Llosa. “Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter” enchanted me. Lituma, the sergeant on his rounds in the foggy night air of Callao, the radio shack that broadcasts the soap operas, with this, the smell and sight of Lima returned. Vargas Llosa campaigned to save the jirons with their narrow streets and characteristic wrought iron.
I went on to read “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” , an account of a revolutionary cell in Jauja, vivid and precise. You are Peru when you read it. You are high up, in the Andes in the mist and rain, overshadowed by looming peaks, or in cheap rooms in Lima conspiring. Rooms that Llosa knew. Rooms he had lived in.
Later I devoured “A Fish in The Water” , a long account of Vargas Llosa running his campaign for Peru’s presidency spliced with his life story. One chapter goes forward, one goes back. A long, gripping and complex read following the intricacies of Peruvian politics. In this book, he tells of his job in the San Marcos Library reading and filing the earliest accounts from Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and priests of the culture. They encountered. Llosa, like Hugh Thomas saw how these early Europeans had a medieval mindset which interpreted all they saw and encountered. Mine was medical, provincial, left wing but essentially, Calvinist. The Presbyterians were the ruling class in my NZ childhood.
After crossing Peru to Bolivia in trains ( I was lucky to take one of the last trains out of Desamparados Station in Lima where we queued all morning to get on the train, up to Huancayo zigzagging all day up the Andean mountainside. One engine was in front, one to the rear. Desamparados Station is now a library. Trains no longer run. )
I took trucks and buses into Bolivia from Lake Titicaca standing up all day in a fantastical bleak golden landscape ringed by mountains through ploughed fields where huge pigs slumbered. Once, my companions and I were summoned from our perch on the truck by two men in uniform by a hut. One polished a bayonet knife throughout our conversation. They asked for our passports and one man I didn’t like kept turning it over and over, looking at its blue cover again and again and looking again and again at me. We were travelling on NZ passports, the same colour as American. Finally we were allowed to climb back up to the top of the truck. Vargas Llosa does describe how gringo tourists were taken and held hostage.
My impression has always been that “Magic Realism” is a European, Anglo-Saxon term for a world that is real. It’s inaccurate to call the writers magic realists. The culture is so complex, different, rich with roots in pre conquest customs and beliefs that we need to grasp its different reality and engage with it. On trains I saw, after many hours travelling, that mothers were very young. Mostly teenagers, they saw I was even ten years older than them, with no children in tow. They asked me about myself, I was as much a complete mystery to them as they were to me. Even the railway station, the forsaken? How could anyone name a railway station? To a traveller from a very Protestant culture where stations bore the names of the town of origin, to call a station after the Virgin of Desamparados was strange. I understand it now.
Then in Cuzco, up at 0400 to get the cheapest train to Machu picchu, we weaved our way through sleeping market traders, their children, of all ages dozing beside them well wrapped up against the cold. Misty air, pickpockets so adept they would slice your pocket without harming you to get money. Americans, sleeping later asserted that all the traders and market stall holders lived in luxury flats just out of town..
Each time I longed to go back and resume my travels I could reach for Casa Verde.
In “Aunt Julia and The scriptwriter” a curious theme emerges of dreams and of fantastical life stories told. Last year I visited Sigmund Freud’s house in Hampstead. I had never been but my psychiatrist niece was keen to go, so we went. There was a small section devoted to Freud’s connection with South American Psychiatrists who carried a long correspondence with Freud, eager to explore and follow his writings. In turn a genre of radio shows grew out of this friendship. People could phone in with their dreams which a guest Psychiatrist would interpret. It was wildly popular, and the connection can be seen in Vargas Llosa’s themes and characters and his Peruvian sense of reality and culture.
In A Fish in the Water, he describes how he worked in the San Marcos Library in Lima translating very early accounts of first European explorers and describes how these men arrived with an entirely medieval, fantastical mindset interpreting all they saw through these eyes. That thought delighted me.
Later, much later, I read Michael Jacob’s “Andes”, and here Jacobs comes to understand the culture he has immersed himself in. It isn’t going too far to say that my arduous, uncomfortable rides, standing up all day in a truck crossing the Altiplano changed my life. I was never to be the same after seeing the world Vargas LLosa so magnificently describes. The noisy, rackety,chaotic cities like La Paz, where nobody drove a car with anything more than small side lights and horns blew night and day.
The poorest shanties up in the heights of the town, the wealthy living far below, the reverse of European ideas of preferred place. In this world LLosas characters move, act and live. His is an astounding achievement. I’m going back to reread more.
In this work, entitled ‘Guadeloupe’, Susan reflects that ‘often in Spain I’ve been searching for traces of Peru‘. Susan’s latest show ‘In Ladbroke Grove’, will be held at Browse & Darby, 34 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AY, from 2nd to 23rd May 2025.
ARTES 