%D 2022 %P 1-29 %A Stefano Rossoni %T ‘A Sinful Passion’: Mario Vargas Llosa’s Readings of Borges from 1964 to 2014 %O © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). %X This article examines Vargas Llosa’s fifty-year-long conflicted fascination for Jorge Luis Borges. The young and leftist Vargas Llosa disregarded Borges as the embodiment of a disengaged intellectual, while the mature Vargas Llosa celebrates him as the emblem of cosmopolitanism that should inspire globalized societies today. Focusing on different stages of Vargas Llosa’s intellectual biography, I examine how his interpretations of Borges are informed by readings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez and Miguel de Cervantes. Considering the intersections of political engagement and literary theories, I study how Vargas Llosa incorporates Borges’ intellectualism into his fiction and imbues it with eroticism. %L discovery10149247 %K Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Reception, Literature, Politics, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, Deicide, Nove, lLiberalism %J Bulletin of Spanish Studies %I Informa UK Limited