The silent suffering of Mario Vargas Llosa: Five years of dealing with an incurable disease
The Nobel Prize winner was diagnosed with a serious illness in the summer of 2020. He didn’t want to make it public, but his closest friends knew. He spent his final months visiting the settings of some of his most celebrated novels
Mario Vargas Llosa had known for almost five years that he was going to die. His doctors told him in the summer of 2020. According to the writer’s closest associates, one of the first things the Nobel Prize winner in Literature did after receiving the news was write a letter to his three children: Álvaro, Morgana, and Gonzalo. In it, he told them about his illness, a serious illness, in his case incurable, but for which there were treatments that could delay the final outcome. The “tribe,” as the Vargas Llosas call themselves, was quick to respond to the call of the pater familias. The letter served to bring Vargas Llosa even closer to his children and for everyone to finally forget the family disagreements that arose in 2015, when the author of works such as The Time of the Hero (1963) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1975) broke off his 50-year marriage to Patricia Llosa to begin a relationship with Isabel Preysler.
