We celebrate 80 years of Mario Vargas Llosa with some of his best works

On March 28, Mario Vargas Llosa turned 80, an appropriate occasion to take stock of the career of one of the great Hispanic writers of recent times and one of the few survivors of the Latin American boom whose great works still occupy many of our reading nights.

Born in the Peruvian city of Arequipa in 1926, Gabriel García Márquez's greatest rival has to his credit a total of eighteen novels, ten essays, another ten plays, various children's stories and even his own biography. A prolific author and main witness of a twentieth century in which he has tried to embrace part of the essence of his native Peru, Latin America, and a Europe that welcomed him for the last sixty years, sharing his original Peruvian nationality with the Spanish. From 1993.

In turn, the author of La fiesta del chivo has won all the awards he has received and for having, including the Prince of Asturias, the Planet Prize and, especially, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

A belated acknowledgment to an author whom we congratulate for proposing these five works by Mario Vargas Llosa, who has just turned 80.

The city and the Dogs

Vargas Llosa's first published novel came to boost the take off of the Latin American boom that would take over the literary world like a hurricane throughout the 60s. Published in 1963, The City and the Dogs covers the experiences of various young people trained at the Leoncio Prado Military College (here called the Military College of Lima), located in the Peruvian city of Callao. A place in which aggressiveness and violence are encouraged among its young pupils, specifically in characters such as El Jaguar or El Esclavo, under whose perspectives we witness the convulsive military circles of the Latin American country. One of the best examples of the Hispanic realist novel that we remember.

The green House

Published in 1966, Vargas Llosa's second novel is also one of his most popular thanks to the scheme of stories, places and characters forged between the Peruvian desert and the always vibrant Amazon jungles, the exotic setting of that brothel called La casa verde founded by Don Anselmo, a character who is continued by the stories of Sergeant Lituma, a civil guard destined for the jungle, or the adventurer Fushía. A novel in which critics praised the author's ability to encompass various perspectives and dialogues blurred in time and space but united in the same narrative thread.

Conversation in the Cathedral

Vargas Llosa's third novel (1969) is, in turn, one of the author's own favorites. The starting point of the work lies in the Catedral bar, located in the poor neighborhood near the Rímac river in Lima and the scene of that initial conversation between Santiago Zavala, the son of a high-class family from which he has dissociated himself, and Ambrosio , a mestizo who tries to earn a living in Lima, two of the portraits of a troubled city in the 60s in which Vargas Llosa's determination to denounce what was one of the darkest episodes in Peru prevails: the dictatorship of Odría, which becomes the background of the story that moves all its characters.

The party of the goat

The possibly Vargas Llosa's most praised novel encompassed three stories set in the Dominican Republic dominated by Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, one of the most perverse dictators in history and assassinated in 1961. The novel covers the conspiracy of his murderers, the life, work (and hexes) of Trujillo and the flight of a young Dominican who returns years later to reconcile with her demons . Published in 2000, La fiesta del chivo (The Goat Party) came in a propitious year to take stock of that Caribbean hell so relevant in the recent history of Latin America. And to me, at least, I was captivated and horrified in equal measure (in the "best" sense of the word).

Bad girl antics

Released in 2006, Bad Girl's Pranks is listed as Vargas Llosa's first romantic novel. And it is that the love story (and eroticism) between Ricardo Somocurcio and the immigrant Lily in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima marks the starting point of that story that takes place over forty years in various parts of the world during a second half of the twentieth century in which both lovers continually search for each other and take off, becoming victims of a capricious destiny. As a reference, the book is the author's most popular on Goodreads.

We celebrate the 80 years of Mario Vargas Llosa with these 5 books considered as some of the best in the long bibliography of this Spanish-Peruvian author aware of the problems of his time and, specifically, of a Latin America whose writers have always been its best ambassadors.

What is your favorite book by Vargas Llosa?