Every time I hear the words ‘magical realism’ I want to reach for my revolver. Back in the 1970s, paperback editions of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez appeared in student bedsits more predictably than lava lamps and posters of Che Guevara (often with the back cover torn for marijuana spliff filters). Published in 1967, the Colombian saga spawned countless ‘magical’ imitations, not all of them good. Mario Vargas Llosa, the distinguished Peruvian novelist, is associated with the realismo mágico school but, wary of the example set by García Márquez and other Latin American peers (Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar), he wrote novels that were sometimes closer to fictionalised journalism. 

Vargas Llosa died in 2025, at the age of eighty-nine. His matinee-idol good looks had long gone. He resembled a ‘waxen dummy’, writes Gerald Martin, and was on the rebound from a high-profile relationship with the Spanish-Filipina socialite (and Hello! magazine regular) Isabel Preysler. By any standards, Vargas Llosa is a difficult quarry for biographers. He was noted for his determination to keep aspects of his life secret; his love life was marked by scandal. He had a violent streak, moreover, that erupted in 1976 when, in a shameful episode, he punched García Márquez in the face at a film premiere in Mexico City. 

Half a century on, the most famous right hook in the history of Latin America remains the subject of feverish speculation. Martin, an emeritus professor of modern languages at the University of Pittsburgh, devotes ten pages to the punch in his exhaustive biography of Vargas Llosa, but even then is