Mario Vargas Llosa’s great loves: His aunt Julia, his cousin Patricia, and socialite Isabel Preysler The Nobel Prize winner had a romantic life worthy of a novel. He married a relative 12 years his senior, then left her for another one. In 2015, he began a high-profile relationship with a star of gossip magazines The brief and stormy marriage of Ernesto Vargas and Dora Llosa left a lasting mark on their only son, Mario Vargas Llosa .
The writer’s parents separated five and a half months after their marriage, before the child was even born. Little Mario grew up with his maternal family, believing his father was dead. Much later, when he already had gray hair, the Nobel Prize winner understood the reason for his parents’ failed marriage: resentment and social complex.
“Because Ernesto Vargas, despite his white skin, his light eyes, and his handsome figure, belonged — or felt that he belonged, which is the same thing — to a family socially inferior to that of his wife,” he revealed in his memoirs, A Fish in the Water , published in 1993. Given this background, it’s no surprise that Vargas Llosa sought love within his own family. In 1955, at the age of 19, he met Julia Urquidi, the sister of his aunt Olga, whom he had known since childhood.
“Aunt” Julia, as he called her, was 12 years older than him, had recently divorced, and was visiting Lima to spend a few weeks on vacation with her family. The writer, who was in his third year of university, fell in love w.