Lima and Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract

Lima is doubtlessly the most recurrent site of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels, even though he spent most of his life in other locations. His choosing of Lima as a topic is an acknowledgment of the centralist role the city plays in the history of Peru, but it entails as well Vargas Llosa’s symbolic intuition that representing that centrality is not a way to reaffirm it but a way to subvert it and to look at its underside. This article traces the presence of Lima in Vargas Llosa’s fiction on two different levels – Lima as a place and a function in the national circuit of internal social, cultural, and political dynamics in Peru and Lima as an urban labyrinth of inner power relations, radically opposed to the well-known center/margin (or inside/outside) power relation put forwards by Uruguayan critic and literary theorist Ángel Rama in his seminal book The Lettered City (which, ironically enough, was originally published with a prologue by Vargas Llosa).