In memoriam: Efrain Kristal, 66, comparative literature scholar whose brilliance, humility wowed peers

Efrain Kristal, a distinguished professor of comparative literature and of Spanish and Portuguese, died Nov. 14. He was 66.

Kristal was widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature and with whom Kristal enjoyed a long, close friendship.

"He was by far the most impressive mind I have encountered," said José Luiz Passos, a UCLA professor of Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures since 2008, who first met Kristal three decades ago when Passos began his graduate work at UCLA. "He had a relentless intellectual curiosity and he spoke eloquently and with great insight on a range of topics - literature, theater and the arts.

"But what really set him apart was his ability to see the best in people and how generous he was to friends from all walks of life."

During his 34 years at UCLA, Kristal earned two of the campus's highest honors for faculty. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2000, and he was selected to deliver the Faculty Research Lecture in 2015. He twice served as chair of the comparative literature department, from 2002 to 2005 and 2009 to 2017.

Among the most influential of the eight books he wrote were "Invisible Work: Borges and Translation" (Vanderbilt Press, 2002), about the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, and "Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa" (Vanderbilt Press, 1998). In a 2010 UCLA video, Kristal discussed Vargas Llosa's body of work, his influences and his Nobel Prize.

A capacious scholar

Teo Ruiz, a UCLA distinguished research professor of history, met Kristal in 1998 when Ruiz arrived at UCLA. The two quickly struck up a lasting friendship. "It was really easy to befriend him because he was always generous with his time, with his praise and with the world around him," Ruiz said.

Ruiz said Kristal was "a capacious scholar. He wrote about the 16th century, about Vargas Llosa and Borges and German philosophy. He wrote and edited poetry. He edited collections of Latin American literature, and he received fellowships in England, France, Germany, Italy and Peru. He was truly an international polymath, and he turned all of his interests in culture into something beautiful and artful."

Kristal's passion for his work was evident not only in his own expansive scholarship but in how he mentored his students.

Jason Araujo, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature, said the opportunity to study with Kristal was the reason he chose UCLA.

"Efrain had an incredible command of language and culture, and he wanted to share that with others," Araujo said. "He understood the value of pushing beyond one's initial idea about something, and he always wanted to inspire people to explore the limits of their interests and of their competencies."

Araujo said even while Kristal's depth of knowledge about music, for example, was readily apparent, the professor never sought to impress with how much he knew.

"His focus was about sharing his passion for the music," he said. "He could give you insight into Wagner, Sibelius or Shostakovich because he had listened so intensely. One thing he always addressed was that one's passion should have a space."

If classical music was a lifelong interest of Kristal's, his own lectures sometimes inspired comparisons to the form. In 1993, in Melbourne, Australia, Kristal gave a 20-minute talk at a conference devoted entirely to Vargas Llosa. He didn't know it at the time, but his future wife, Romy Sutherland, was in the audience that day.

"In an utterly original 20-minute talk, Efrain transformed my understanding of world literature, Latin American literature's place within it, and Vargas Llosa's place within that," Sutherland said. "His argument was made all the more persuasive by the symphonic structure of his lecture, with four movements, each subtly foreshadowing and echoing interlocking themes, concluding with a coda that consolidated the coherence and deepened the meaning of the whole."

Kristal and Sutherland met after the lecture and soon began dating. They married a few years later; Sutherland has been a UCLA adjunct professor of comparative literature since 2011.

'In every lecture, something surprising'

Among the courses Kristal taught at UCLA, one of his favorites was a popular class on Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

But in addition to his expertise in connecting literary forms and eras, Kristal had a knack for weaving together topics of interest from outside of literature. That ability wowed colleagues, including Scott Chandler, a UCLA professor emeritus of neuroscience. Chandler and Kristal met in 2000 at a celebration for the Distinguished Teaching Awards; Chandler was a fellow honoree.

A few years later, Chandler invited Kristal to teach as part of the Mind over Matter cluster course that he had developed, which considered topics in neuroscience from a range of perspectives. Eventually, Kristal accepted, leading classes on how the humanities relate to neuroscience.

"He spoke about things from a historical point of view in a way that was totally new to me," Chandler said. "He would speak about Shakespeare and King Lear's mental illness, and ask students, 'What parts of the brain do you think might be affecting him?' But everything he spoke about was couched in neuroscience. I found it incredible, and the students were fixated on him. In every lecture, he did something surprising."

The experience forged a friendship among Chandler and his wife, and Kristal and Sutherland; they attended plays and concerts together and met regularly for breakfast.

"The thing that most struck me about Efrain was that he was a scholar's scholar," Chandler said. "He was a patient, gentle man. When he spoke, people would really listen. He thought about everything and nothing he said was superfluous."

Early exposure to classics

Kristal was born April 19, 1959, in Lima, Peru, to a mother from Romania and an electrical engineer father of Polish descent. His love of literature took root at a very early age: When he was just 6 or 7, his father read versions of "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" to young Efrain. The younger Kristal was riveted.

The Kristals moved from Peru to San Diego when Efrain was 11, to enable his mother to pursue a doctorate in psychology. But within a year after the move, Kristal's father died from a heart attack.

To help make ends meet - Kristal had a younger sister, Sylvia, and the family lived for a time in a one-bedroom apartment - Efrain began tutoring students at a synagogue at the age of 12.

Not long after, the family received more devastating health news: His mother was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. According to a 2015 UCLA profile of Kristal, his mother beat the odds, living well past that projection, completing her doctorate and becoming an assistant professor of psychology at UC San Diego, where she focused on the health needs of California's Latino population.

If his father inspired his lifelong love of literature, it was Kristal's mom who instilled in him his love of education. Although she wanted him to go into engineering - even enrolling him at UC Berkeley as an engineering student - Kristal soon found his way to comparative literature.

After earning his bachelor's in that discipline from Berkeley in 1980, Kristal received a master's in Spanish literature from Stanford University in 1982.

He then moved to France to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at École normale supérieure, under the tutelage of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. When he learned that his mother's health was declining rapidly, he cut his program short, graduating instead with a master's degree in 1983, and returned to California to be with her in her final days.

The path to UCLA

He went on to earn a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford in 1985, while maintaining his study of philosophy and developing a particular interest in the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Kristal would go on to write a handful of papers about Sloterdijk, and he authored the introduction for Sloterdijk's 2025 book, "The Terrible Children of Modernity: An Antigenealogical Experiment."

The same year he completed his doctorate, Kristal was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. Eager to enrich his knowledge of art history, he regularly spent time at the nearby National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In 1987, he joined the faculty at Harvard University as an assistant professor in Romance languages and literatures. While there, Kristal received the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship, which offered the chance to spend two years in Berlin working on a research project of his choice. But Harvard would grant him only a six-month leave.

Around that time, Kristal had been invited to UCLA by Herbert Morris, then the dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities. Morris asked Kristal what it would take to lure him from Harvard. Kristal replied, "A two-year leave of absence and tenure at a good university." Morris responded, "What about tenure at a great university?"

Kristal moved to UCLA in 1991 - and he was able to complete his Humboldt Fellowship after all.

In addition to his wife, Kristal is survived by his sister, Sylvia Lewinstein, a 1982 graduate of UC Santa Barbara.