Mario Vargas Llosa meets the press in New York after his Nobel prize for literature victory., Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images I first met Mario Vargas Llosa in London in 1989, at a dinner party organised by a mutual friend, Nicholas Shakespeare. I had been hired by a Hollywood studio to write a script based on Vargas Llosa's wonderful semi-autobiographical novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and was both very keen and somewhat wary about the prospective encounter. I was very keen because I was an unashamed fan of Vargas Llosa, the writer – it took me a second to accept the Aunt Julia job – but wary because I quickly came to realise that the book was a fantastically difficult challenge to turn into a movie and my Hollywood brief was uncompromising: there was no way the film was going to be placed in its vividly rendered setting in Lima, Peru – Aunt Julia had to be Americanised.
In fact, the meeting couldn't have been more reassuring and agreeable. Vargas Llosa was as enthused as I was about the possible film and unperturbed about its required US location (we ended up with New Orleans, as close to Lima as the US could provide, I calculated). He gave the enterprise his blessing: "Make it a bold adaptation," he said, urging me to take risks. And so, taking him at his word, I did. And I am relieved to report that he liked the eventual film (starring a young Keanu Reeves in the Vargas Llosa role).
And now he has won the Nobel prize for literature. Does it strain interpretation to see in that first meeting some of the factors that might have gained him the prize? Cosmopolitanism, pluralism, conviviality, worldliness, multi- lingualism, audacity, comedy, experimentalism, are all epithets that can be attached to his name and his work. Aunt Julia is probably my favourite novel of his – for obvious reasons – but the body of work that Vargas Llosa has produced since his first novel, The Time of the Hero in 1963, is both prodigious and admirable. The range is remarkable – from the surreal fantasies of the radio soap operas in Aunt Julia to the baroque comedy of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service; from weighty historical epics such as The War at the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat to the whodunit thriller-style of Who Killed Palomero Molero? Vargas Llosa is very hard to classify and pin down as a writer: he has written short novels and very long novels, comic novels and deeply serious novels, straightforward realistic novels and recognisably South American "magic-realist" novels. Perhaps this unclassifiability has been seen as a disadvantage. Indeed, when one compares Vargas Llosa to his great South American literary rival Gabriel García Márquez one is reminded of Archilochus's old fox and hedgehog adage: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." Márquez, a hedgehog novelist if there ever was one, received his Nobel in 1982 at the age of 55. Vargas Llosa received his at the age of 74. Almost 30 years later the day of the fox has arrived – it inevitably comes around, even if it takes a little longer.
There is another consideration when it comes to Vargas Llosa. His reputation as a writer is trammelled by the controversial public events in his own life, namely the political voyage he has made from the left of South American politics to the libertarian right. Both reasons perhaps explain why this prize – for which he is routinely considered a contender each year – has been comparatively late in coming. He is a great South American novelist but one who combines that continent's vibrant and malign profusion, its energy and crazy humour, with what might be termed a European intellectual rigour. His scholarly and imaginative interpretation of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, The Perpetual Orgy, perhaps illustrates that capacity of his mind most effectively.
Few novelists today have combined the public man and the private artist so prominently as Vargas Llosa – how many novelists have run for president, as Vargas Llosa did in the 1990 elections in Peru? Perhaps it's fair to say that his political adventures have tended to obscure the very real achievements of his novels and their manifest literary ambition. One of the blessings of winning the Nobel (among its few curses) is that it does focus attention once more on the work, and Vargas Llosa's oeuvre deserves to be reconsidered in its own right. And while it's true that the historical novels, with their forthright and fascinating reinterpretations of South American political upheavals and machinations, seem the most obviously hefty and momentous, my own private celebration will concentrate on other works in the Vargas Llosa canon.
It's most present in Aunt Julia but it could be argued it is the leitmotif of all his works of fiction: Vargas Llosa has continually celebrated the sexual and amatory electricity between men and women – that ticking clock that animates almost all of us, whether to delightful or disastrous effect, or both. Sometimes it is explicit (in all senses of the word) in a novel such as In Praise of the Stepmother or The Bad Girl, but such a concern runs as a life-enhancing note through almost everything he has written. Intriguingly, in an attempt to derail his presidential bid in 1990, his opponents used to read out the more shocking and sexually candid sections of his novels over the radio in an attempt to encourage voters to shift allegiance. Maybe it worked: certainly Vargas Llosa didn't win. His readers, I suspect, were secretly very grateful – it meant he could continue writing.
Vargas Llosa, in all his multifacetedness, in spite of and as well as his many rare gifts and talents as a novelist, remains fundamentally a great chronicler of the highs and lows of our carnal and passionate adventures as human beings – our many mishaps and shameful duplicities, our rare nobility and rarer moments of pure happiness. His work reveals what the novel does best – in that it "gets" the human condition better than any other art form. Vargas Llosa's novels understand and reproduce the absurd and melancholy tragicomedy of our lives and their occasionally inspiring moments of pure happiness. The Nobel is hugely merited and I suspect Vargas Llosa will be very pleased. But then he'll say to himself: it's only a prize, it's the books that matter.
• This is a preview from tomorrow's Guardian Review. This week's review also includes: Booker-shortlisted Howard Jacobson in praise of the comic novel, Al Alvarez on the newly-discovered Ted Hughes poem, a Forward prize-winning poem by Seamus Heaney and an interview with the winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize
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