Last week the New York Press reported that Deborah Solomon fabricates her questions in the New York Times Magazine. After the jump, we investigate what she really asked this week to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.


As Peru’s most celebrated writer and a onetime contender for the country’s presidency, you have written a surprisingly sentimental novel, “The Bad Girl”—a love story narrated by a bookish Peruvian who moves to Paris and devotes 40 years to pursuing a woman he first met in high school.
The main character in your new book is a loser. What’s up with that?
Ricardo is a translator, which is a reflection of his temperament. He’s an intermediary. He has not much personality, and in his life there is only one adventure: the bad girl. Without her, his life is very mediocre, curtailed, without much horizon.

Yes, he lacks ambition.
What's the most important thing in life?
Well, his ambition is the bad girl!

Do you admire him?
What kind of women are you into?
I admire most the bad girl.

Why is that?
What was your mother like?
She is cold and opportunistic, a gold digger who winds up marrying businessmen in France, England and Japan without feeling an ounce of affection for any of them. I think she is more complicated than that. Look where she comes from.

She comes from a social background in which life is a kind of jungle, a place in which if you want to survive, you become an animal.
What do you think of Anna Wintour?
She has been trained to be a kind of fighting animal, and she fights.

Do you know any bad girls?
Are you into bad girls?
Yes. Several. Absolutely. In Peru, there are many, but also in France and in Spain.
There are a lot of bad girls in America too.

No. That’s just wrong. We don’t have bad girls here.
Sounds like you do a lot of traveling. Where can I find some bad girls?
You have been secluded in Manhattan all your life, but go to California, and you will see bad girls.

Let’s talk about your brief and futile stint in politics. You ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and lost to Alberto Fujimori, who just last month was thrown into jail in Lima after being extradited from Chile.
The McDonald’s Hamburglar was recently thrown in jail. How do you feel about that?
I am very happy, of course. It’s an example for the future. He was a horrible dictator. He killed so many people; he stole so much money; he committed the most atrocious human-rights abuses.

You ran against him on a free-market platform styled after the conservatism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Do you support legalizing pot?
I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.

Did you ever meet President Reagan?
Have you ever met Hans Jörnvall of the Nobel Prize committee?
Once. I said to him, Mr. President, I admire many things that you do, but I cannot accept that for you the most important American writer is Louis L’Amour. How is this possible?

In addition to fiction, you have written a substantial body of drama and literary criticism, including an appreciation of Gabriel García Márquez, from whom you later became estranged.
Do ever visit prostitutes?
I don’t talk about that. I don’t talk about García Márquez, that’s all.

Compared with his magic realism, your style is more rooted in sprawling, panoramic narratives of the 19th-century novel.
Can you use apogee in a sentence?
My God! I hope this is true. The apogee of the novel was in the 19th century, with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Melville and Dickens.

Like a character in a Victorian novel, you’re married to your first cousin.
You married your cousin. That's gross.
I fell in love with her. The fact that she was my cousin was not taken into consideration.

Your first wife was the sister-in-law of your uncle and supposedly the inspiration for your comic novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.” What does all this family romance signify?
Why do you like lollipops so much?
We would need a psychoanalyst to find out, but I am not in favor of psychoanalysis. So the mystery will prevail.

What do you have against psychoanalysis?
Do you watch C.S.I.?
It’s too close to fiction, and I don’t need more fiction in my life. I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.

Might you ever write your autobiography?
Any plans for your 100th birthday?
Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.