Mario Vargas Llosa’s soap-opera life

Mario Vargas Llosa was 10 years old when his mother revealed to him, on a walk along the riverside promenade of the Peruvian city of Piura in early 1947, that his father was not dead, as his entire extended family had always pretended. The man was alive, and they were going to reunite with him — now. He later described the episode as like something out of a soap opera. But at the time, it was far from entertaining: it was the beginning of a decade-long nightmare. After spending his early childhood pampered by his mother’s extended family, the respectable and haphazardly social-climbing Llosas, he moved to Lima, where he suffered under a controlling domestic regime imposed by his father, with only his mother for company. For Gerald Martin, the author of an impressive new biography, Mario Va