"The best novels are not those that do not shed light on reality, but many," Vargas Llosa once wrote. The same could be said of his personality: multifaceted, titanic, indefatigable. Which facet of him will we be left with? One can review the many images he has offered throughout his life: the defender of individual freedoms, the committed intellectual, the frustrated politician, the charismatic seducer. Above all, however, Vargas Llosa was a lover of literature in all its manifestations. This is the only way to understand his stubborn, unwavering dedication to reading and writing. Even for the millions of people who have not read him, Vargas Llosa is and will be "the" writer par excellence.

Mario Vargas Llosa survived until last Sunday to several generations of readers. On the one hand, there are those who discovered him in the 1960s and marveled at the extraordinary narrative fabric of his first three novels. Today Conversation in the Cathedral would be a minority novel, but then mass reading could be more demanding. Forty years later, a very different public bought The Celt's Dream thanks to the Nobel award . In between and after, there remained an extensive work whose most obvious peaks were Aunt Julia and the Scrivener, The War at the End of the World and, above all, The Feast of the Goat. When one reviews his very long career, one cannot help but be surprised by the enormous wealth of subjects he dared to touch upon, without sparing essays on authors he admired and humbly recognized as his masters, from Gustave Flaubert to Juan Carlos Onetti.

Love tends to renew us from within and maintain the youthfulness of the spirit. The torrential passion for literature was the great love of the Peruvian writer. The day he learned that he was going to receive the Nobel Prize, he was preparing a class on Alejo Carpentier and the marvelous real for Princeton University. We know that he studied the script of his classes with the meticulousness of a beginner, he, who had been the protagonist of one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century. It was the same motivation with which he started a novel, got involved in intellectual debates or tried his luck as a theater actor at the age of seventy. That's why he also devoured all class of books that had to do with the stories he was going to tell. His creative attitude was accompanied by the illusion of an interpreter who is starting over, perhaps also with the anxiety of a novice, always with the arrow drawn on his bow.

After all, Vargas Llosa has gone young.