The Book Fair paid tribute to Mario Vargas Llosa with voices and anecdotes.

The Book Fair paid tribute to Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025) with the presence of writers and journalists Jorge Fernández Diaz , the Spaniard Juan Cruz Ruiz and Raúl Tola , in charge of the Vargas Llosa Chair.

For a long time, the three maintained close contact with the renowned writer from Arequipa . His devotion to Buenos Aires, his relationship with Borges and Cortázar, the unforgettable argument with García Márquez, his great works, and the celebration of his Nobel Prize in Literature were some of the themes that resonated with nostalgia in the Victoria Ocampo Room (White Pavilion), amid stories, anecdotes, and experiences, as they fondly remembered him.

Vargas Llosa's family was specially invited to this event but was absent from the room. "We had invited Patricia Vargas Llosa , Mario's wife, and his son, Álvaro Vargas Llosa. They are in Buenos Aires but are still deeply affected by this recent event," explained Alejandro Vaccaro, former president of the El Libro Foundation. Last Saturday, both participated in another event in memory of the writer.

Jorge Fernández Díaz began by reading a long text. He highlighted Vargas Llosa's passion for Buenos Aires , his relationship with Cortázar, and his dislike of Peronism.

“Buenos Aires seemed to Mario Vargas Llosa to be one of the most literary and beloved cities in the world. During his remote childhood in Peru, the entire family received three coveted magazines every week: his father read Rio Plano , his mother Para Ti , and Mario learned from the colorful pages of Billiken ,” Fernández Díaz recalled.

“Then, at 17, with his vocation firmly and firmly established, he considered whether he should develop as a writer in Buenos Aires or Paris. To Vargas Llosa, like to almost any enlightened Latin American of the time, those two destinations seemed equally mythical, prestigious, and stimulating,” added the winner of the 2025 Nadal Prize for the novel El secreto de Marcial.

He also said that Vargas Llosa “ chose Paris but always kept an eye on our city , the city by the lion-colored river. In his old age, he couldn’t understand how it was possible that no one had yet written the most obvious novel of all, one that definitively and truthfully portrayed the painful and spectacular decline from that cultured and prosperous country to this somewhat crude and impoverished nation it had become.”

“One of his friends was Julio Cortázar, who showed the outsider the secret and magical side of Paris, the City of Light ,” Fernández Díaz recalled in his text.

The Argentine journalist and writer also pointed out that the Peruvian novelist and essayist " experienced with Cortázar, starting with the French May, an ideological shift in his life and how he was a naive apolitical."

"The father of Casa Tomada had become a staunch and obtuse defender of Stalinism and the Cuban regime. This fundamental disagreement, however, failed to alienate Mario and Julio ."

“ The two maintained their affection until Cortázar's death , whom Vargas Llosa publicly praised with all kinds of artistic praise and privately excused his ideological radicalizations by explaining that Cortázar had always been little less than a political illiterate,” he recalled.

For his part, Fernández Díaz emphasized the turbulent relationship between the Peruvian writer and the author of El Aleph . “On a trip to Buenos Aires, he wanted to interview him and visited him in his apartment on Maipú Street. Upon discovering the leaky roof and the bare walls, he asked him bluntly: 'How can it be that you live in this apartment, Borges?'”

“His interlocutor immediately stood up: 'Well, I wish you well. We Argentine gentlemen don't boast .' The next day, Borges mentioned to a third party: 'A Peruvian came to see me and he has to work in a real estate agency,'” Fernández Díaz shared the endearing anecdote between Borges and Vargas Llosa, amid widespread laughter from those in the room.

"Vargas Llosa always remembered that Borgesian episode (when he was fired from the National Library) and attributed the shameful Argentine debacle to the Justicialist idiosyncrasy ," Fernández Díaz emphasized.

In other passages of his reading, the writer and journalist for the newspaper La Nación recalled that the Peruvian writer "came to Buenos Aires no less than 15 times in the last 25 years and at one point even intended to live there for at least six months" (…). "Each of these visits was an investigation into the deterioration and collapse of our country and an increasingly harsh questioning of the main culprit: Peronism," he emphasized.

Then, the words of Peruvian journalist and writer Raúl Tola. He asserted that "interviewing him was a relatively simple art."

“ One would approach interviews with Vargas Llosa very frightened by the emergence of the character, but when one was engaged in the conversation, one discovered that this enormous, universal figure was at the same time so relatable, so generous, so affectionate. Furthermore, he helped journalists so generously that the interviews could even become simple,” he recounted.

Regarding his relationship with Cortázar, he said that the author of Hopscotch “was the person who showed Vargas Llosa that hidden country (France) that he knew well.”

Instead, " with Borges, the story of the interview that led to the disagreement happened. Borges didn't like me mentioning the leaky roof of his house," Tola explained.

“In one conversation, we began to speculate whether Borges had read Vargas Llosa. I had the information: Borges visited Peru and was interviewed by Enrique Chirino Soto, a Peruvian journalist and later politician. “When I asked him about Vargas Llosa, Borges said a revealing phrase: 'That kid Vargas Llosa writes well, but he's a real liar because he came to my house and encrypted some leaks for me,'” recalled the Director of the Vargas Llosa Chair.

Tola, 49, said that all the authors of his generation in Latin America or Spanish-speaking countries began their careers as writers thanks to Mario Vargas Llosa. “He taught us that our raw material, our Latin American identity, could create extremely high literature comparable to those great classics like Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Faulkner, Hemingway, and others whom we read, precisely, with Vargas Llosa himself.”

Finally, the words of Juan Cruz Ruiz , who remembered Vargas Llosa as an “extraordinary” character.

“ He was a person without fear and without the ability to hate people . He was a writer, but, especially for me, he was a person who first faced the consequences of living lives believing that everything would be better when, suddenly, he discovered that everything could be worse: that was when he discovered he had a father (Ernesto Vargas Maldonado), and that father, over time, turned him into a sad person until, finally, literature saved him.”

The Spanish journalist and editor, one of the founders of the Spanish newspaper El País , said that Fish in the Water "is Vargas Llosa's most important book. " "It was the one that, in one way or another, accompanied him over time, helping him explain to himself what had happened to his father, why he felt so frightened by that man."

“I often asked him about that book. It seemed to me to be the most humane of all the books written by the Latin American boom, but many books in the history of literature are also part of what Mario Vargas Llosa also explained in other books about other lives or other events. There was always that moment, when I was 10 years old, and suddenly the man, the father, appears,” Cruz Ruiz recalled.

He also recounted that when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 in Stockholm, he saw him running from the hotel looking for a doctor to save his voice. “ He was really terrified . I asked him what was wrong. He told me he had lost his voice,” Cruz Ruiz recalled.

“The feeling I had was that the voice that Vargas Llosa had lost and that a doctor later helped him recover was a greater vision of his soul and his way of being in life at that moment , as if suddenly a terrible episode, which was the memory of his father, had entered into that episode that was supposed to be happy.”

Cruz Ruiz revealed that he saw Vargas Llosa cry after he recovered his voice. “I feel like it was a limited crying because of his personality. He was a fairly restrained man, but I can't forget that moment : there wasn't just the presence of Patricia, his wife, and his cousin, but the presence of his entire life, as if, suddenly, in that moment of joy over the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was speechless, unable to write, creating the most powerful reminder of the root of his way of approaching life's sad mirages through literature.”

He also noted that Vargas Llosa “was the one who wrote the best book by the man who, along with him, is the best writer of his generation: Gabriel García Márquez.”

“History of a Deicide perfectly explains the literary generosity and the capacity to understand the literature of others besides Mario Vargas Llosa.”

“I have repeatedly refused to explain why that sad event occurred, the fight with the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude ,” Cruz Ruiz revealed, and continued: “I have always refused to know the details of that event: I prefer to read over time everything he wrote about the author of that book and so many other important books .”

“ I have experienced many beautiful moments with Vargas Llosa , some of them complicated. As an author, he was admirable, the most polite person I have ever had—not just the editor who ran the publishing house, but the entire team. He never made a single gesture that would have disqualified him, humanly speaking, as one of the most noble, peaceful, and generous people I have ever known,” Cruz Ruiz concluded.