A total novel

The novels published by Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1970s marked a significant turn in his writing. Unlike those of the 1960s, arguably the most complex examples of high modernist literature in the Latin American canon, the novels of the 1970s – Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) – are characterised by their deft use of humour, their storylines filled with narrative incident and pastiche, and their overall accessibility to general readers. These novels, despite their commercial success, had raised questions among a significant minority of critics, including some of the most influential, about a possible decadence of the Peruvian novelist or a commercialisation of his literature.

The publication of The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) in 1981 signalled for many a return to the ambitious novelising of Vargas Llosa's first period. For instance, Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar found that ‘with The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa again shows his ability to propose extremely vast and complex narrative projects and to develop them with unusual efficacy and ingenuity’. The Uruguayan Angel Rama, another great Latin American literary critic of the period, was even more enthusiastic, proclaiming the novel ‘amasterpiece’, and predicting that in ‘one hundred years … it will be mentioned as one of the key novels of this second half of the twentieth century. Rama even declared Vargas Llosa to be ‘our greatest living classic [writer]’. The doubts that, at least for some, had been generated by the turn in Vargas Llosa’s writing had been answered by the publication of a work that equalled the highest achievements of his earlier period.