Writer, Nobel laureate, and sometime Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa died last week at the age of eighty-nine. He was the last surviving member of the “Boom,” a dazzling generation of Latin American novelists who made their name in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s, and included Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Julio Cortazar, Paraguay’s Augusto Roa Bastos, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like all the Boom writers, Vargas Llosa was influenced by the French masters: Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, and Flaubert. From them, he learned to think of the novel as a sprawling canvas, a vast survey of political and social drama. The epigram to Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa’s greatest work, comes from Balzac: “The novel is the private history of nations.”
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