That Day

“Ten years ago I received a call from my father, Mario Vargas Llosa, telling me that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

I hope you will excuse this rare personal note.

Ten years ago I received a call from my father, Mario Vargas Llosa, telling me that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was glad to be finally freed from the damn question “Why haven’t they given him the Nobel Prize yet?”—almost as much as I was thrilled with the news.

I recently had the pleasure of holding a public dialogue with him to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the award, and the event got me thinking again about something I had pondered before. In 2019, on the occasion of a television series about his life, work, and political commitment, I traveled with him to the places and episodes of his biography. He was, at 83, fit enough to visit a dozen countries on both sides of the Atlantic and talk to me for hours on end. I found myself obsessing about two things. I wanted to better understand—through his personal story—what the essence of someone’s life is, what elements determine a life’s trajectory and which ones are secondary, and how they all combine to shape a person’s character, achievements, and failures. I also wanted to know whether, to understand the work of an author, it is indispensable to know in depth his life, passions, and heartbreaks, as well as the accidents and circumstances of his actions—the decisions he made and those that were forced on him.

Will and talent explain many things, but not the infinite, unpredictable chain of causes and effects of his life, of anyone’s life.

Charles Sainte-Beuve, the famous 19th century French critic, wrote that it was essential to know the details of a writer’s life in order to understand his work. Marcel Proust, the fabled French novelist, argued in Against Sainte-Beuve the opposite: For Proust, a book is the product of a being very different from the one that manifests itself in the habits, social life, and vices of the writer; to understand an author’s work, one has to dig inside one’s own soul and the intimacy conveyed through the author’s work, rather than take into account his exterior world.