SOURCE: Vargas Llosa, Mario. “The Real Life of the Latin American Novelist.” Harper's 287, no. 1720 (September 1993): 22-4.

In the following essay, Vargas Llosa categorizes Arguedas's works as “literature meant for him” and the later works, such as Todas las Sangres, in which he succumbed to the pressures to produce works of social and political conscience, which Vargas Llosa found “a total failure.”

The Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas killed himself the second day of December 1969 in a classroom at La Molina Agricultural University in Lima. He was a very discreet man, and so as not to disturb his colleagues and the students with his suicide he waited until everybody had left the place. Near his body was found a letter with very detailed instructions about his burial: where he should be mourned, who should pronounce the eulogies in the cemetery, and he asked, too, that an Indian musician...