The criticism of the Nobel Prize in Literature is tired but true: The committee really does bestow the award on overly obscure, undeserving writers. From 2007 to 2009 the winners were Doris Lessing, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, and Herta Muller. Huh? So it was with great joy earlier this month when I opened the Times on my stoop and read this year's winner is Mario Vargas Llosa, the scholarly Peruvian novelist and essayist.
Vargas Llosa is surprisingly quite the conservative -- as Alma Guillermoprieto tartly summarized in her review of his memoir of his failed 1990 presidential run, "A Fish in the Water," he "had campaigned as if Peru were already Switzerland," which she dismisses as quite the folly -- for how piercing his writing is. In his more political novels, he fiercely takes down the excesses of power, suggesting he would associate more with the common man than the business class, which he actually does. In his romantic novels, he champions the life of emotion, fancy and the pen over that of masculinity, both of which would seem to fit the profile of a romantic liberal at the barricades, not the well-coiffed man on the Upper East Side (as he is these days, while teaching at Princeton).
That he straddles both and understands them so well is perhaps his biggest accomplishment. He has written one of the most bitter but exquisite opening lines to a novel -- "En que momento se ha jodido el Peru?", at the start of "Conversation in the Cathedral," which roughly translates as "When did Peru fuck itself over so completely?" But he also lovingly captures the madcap adventures of a fictionalized version of his young self in "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," falling in love with his older aunt and holding together a Lima radio station by a shoestring as its soap opera's scriptwriter confuses reality, drama and dreams. Few do it quite like him, with such a deep knowledge of language.
Perhaps it's that extreme talent with language that makes Vargas Llosa's conservatism quite palatable. In a 1994 column for El Pais, the Spanish daily in his adopted hometown of Madrid, he swiftly takes down the first Berlusconi administration, which haughtily tried to assert its superiority over Bolivia. Not so fast, Vargas Llosa protested: "What surprised me most about Ferrerra's [a spokesman's] misinformation is that a good number of Latin American countries have already accomplished (and without making too much of a fuss about it) what his own government -- headed by Berlusconi -- has been trying to accomplish in Italy, without success," -- free-market reforms that unlock foreign investment and entrepreneurial potential, leading to economic and income growth.
I wonder what Vargas Llosa would say about Latin America today, when most of the countries that followed the free market's path didn't make out as well as it appeared they would in 1994. But his approach is always eloquent and rational, and perhaps closer to the center than he's typically given credit for, which is at least worth engaging. And even if one disagrees, there are always all those excellent novels.
Next year, for Roth, please.
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