Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize
Even if I didn’t have affection for the work of Mario Vargas Llosa, who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I would have breathed a sigh of relief that the committee took a moment to bestow the honor on a non-European. The Nobel this past decade has been so Euro-centric that it almost seemed irrelevant: literature around the world is exploding and the grey hairs on the committee in Stockholm kept singling out the whitest of the white folks. My favorite Vargas Llosa novel is “The Feast of the Goat,” a fictional account of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Vargas is the first South American Nobelist in Lit since Garcia Marquez in 1982. VL and GM used to be friends, then had a nasty falling-out, but supposedly have reconciled.
