The Time of the Hero

The Academy

The Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima is a real institution. Vargas Llosa attended it as a teenager, having been sent there by his father — whom he had not known until adolescence — in what appears to have been an attempt to toughen the boy up and end what the father saw as an excessively literary, insufficiently masculine upbringing. The experience was formative in ways the father did not intend. Vargas Llosa spent the next several years turning it into his first novel.

The academy of the novel operates through a system of hierarchy, ritual, and violence that is presented not as aberrant but as functional — as the actual mechanism by which the institution produces whatever it is trying to produce. The first-year cadets (the slaves) are subject to the second-year cadets (the dogs) and the third-year cadets (the guardians of tradition). The seniors organize a theft ring that steals exam questions; the money from selling the answers circulates through the economy of the school. The code of silence — the obligation to never report anything to authority — is not merely a custom but the foundational ethic of the place, the thing that makes the internal economy possible.

What makes the novel’s portrait of the academy more than a catalogue of abuses is Vargas Llosa’s attention to how class operates within it. The Leoncio Prado draws from across Lima’s social spectrum — boys from wealthy families alongside boys from the poor periphery — and the novel traces how those class differences are both suspended (everyone is a cadet) and reproduced (who has connections, who has money, who has the confidence that comes from having always expected the world to accommodate him). The academy is a social laboratory in which Peru’s contradictions are made visible.

The Death and the Informer

The precipitating event is the theft of an exam. The cadets of the Circle steal an exam to sell answers; during the investigation, a cadet known as the Slave — Ricardo Arana, the weakest and most victimized boy in his year — informs. Shortly after, the Slave is shot during a training exercise. The official conclusion is accidental death. The novel is organized around whether this is true, who might have killed him, and who the informer was.

The investigation is conducted simultaneously at multiple levels: by a Lieutenant Gamboa, a principled officer who actually wants to know the truth, and by the Academy’s command, which wants the truth suppressed. The institution’s interest in suppression is not simply corruption — it is self-preservation. An investigation would reveal the theft ring, the beatings, the culture of systematic abuse. It would reveal that the academy does not produce what it claims to produce. The command understands, more clearly than Gamboa does, that the institution is built on secrets and can only be preserved by maintaining them.

The identity of the informer, and of the boy who may have killed the Slave, is revealed in stages across the multiple narrators. Vargas Llosa structures this revelation with the care of a thriller writer while pursuing the moral questions of a novelist: not just who did it, but what it meant to do it, and what kind of society produces a situation in which these are the only available choices.

A Banned Debut

The Time of the Hero was published in Spain in 1963 — Vargas Llosa was twenty-six — and won the Premio Biblioteca Breve, which was then the most prestigious prize for Spanish-language fiction. The Peruvian military’s response was to burn copies of the novel publicly at the Leoncio Prado, dismiss the book as the work of a degenerate, and suggest that its author must have been a bad cadet to have such a view of the institution. A general stated that the book contained more than a thousand lies.

The burning was the best possible publicity. It confirmed that the novel had told some version of the truth, and it made Vargas Llosa — already known in Lima’s literary circles — internationally famous. The Time of the Hero was translated into French, and Vargas Llosa’s career, already underway, became European as well as Latin American.

The debut also established the technical approach that would define his career. The multiple-narrator structure — moving between the Jaguar, the Slave, the Poet (Alberto), and the narrated sections in ways that the reader must reconstruct — is already fully developed. The use of simultaneous timelines, the refusal of omniscient clarity, the insistence that truth is always partial and perspective-dependent: all of this is present in the first novel. Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat are more ambitious applications of methods already visible here.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A debut of remarkable assurance that introduced Vargas Llosa’s techniques to the world and prompted a book-burning. Essential for understanding his development, and still entirely gripping on its own terms.