Mario Vargas Llosa And Fiction As The Art Of Living
"In fact, novels do lie – they can't help doing so – but that's only one part of the story. The other is that, through lying, they express a curious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fasion, masquerading as what it is not. This statement has the ring of gibberish. But actually it's quite simple. Men are not content with their lot and nearly all – rich or poor, brilliant or mediocre, famous or obscure – would like to have a life different from the one they lead. To (cunningly) appease this appetite, fiction was born. It is written and read to provide human beings with lives they're unresigned to not having. The germ of every novel contains an element of non-resignation and desire."
-Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. In an essay in 1984 he addressed the subject of truth in fiction.
"This statement has the ring of gibberish," what a cruious thing to say! I'm not sure he thought that throgh.
Well, now this comment makes no sense, in a fasion.
They punted. Safe choice, not bad not awesome. But then Adonis or Ko Un would have scared the crap out of pretty much everyone. (Not to speak of Ashbery, or Transtromer, even!)
So, why is this Peru's year?
Safe choice, maybe, but only because there's a lot of good work in that career!
You've got political tomes (War of the End of the World), the sensual, shorter works (Aunt Julia/Stepmother), the memoir of running for president (!) (Fish in the Water), and a steady stream of fine essays like "Literature is Fire" (from Making Waves, in which he also shines a light on a forgotten de Beauvoir novel, Les Belles Images).
And that's even if you put a fork in his career back in the 90s. Admittedly, I haven't read any of his stuff from the last decade or so.
Oh, no argument here. he's a fine writer and probably should have won a decade or two ago.
Usually there's a national/political aspect to the choice, too. Any guesses whom this is meant to put on notice — Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil?
Also: three poets in the 70s, three more in the 80s, four in the 90s, none in the 00s. Just. Saying.
That's only because Mattie Stepenak didn't live to see his election.
He loses points for his schoolboy crush on Margaret Thatcher. Bleh.
Is he the first Nobel laureate to have beaten up another Nobel laureate?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/books/29marq.html
Surely Hemingway won't disappoint us.
Stevens did not win the Nobel.
Hemingway probably could have slugged Faulkner, but I think we'd all remember that, have tattoos of it on our backs etc etc. Unless there was a brawl with Churchill, I think Hemingway is in the clear.
Maybe Nadine Gordimer will kick Paul Krugman in the nuts or something.
And so a fine new tradition was born.
When the encounter between Mr. Mailer and Mr. Vidal turned physical, if not bloody, Mr. Vidal is said to have responded from the floor, "'Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.'"
Does the time when Hemingway and Fitzgerald clandestinely boned count? Or am I thinking of Bowie and Iggy?
AND YET AGAIN CORMAC MCCARTHY IS SNUBBED. Fuck you, Sweden!
Don't hold your breath. Methinks the Nobel committee is just waiting out the McCarthys, Dellilos, and Roths of the world. It worked with Updike.
It worked with Updike, Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Leo motherfucking Tolstoy. It'll probably work with Alice Munro, too … The committee has a remarkably sketchy track record. (Although Vargas Llosa is a perfectly respectable choice.)
There isn't a single Nobel Laureate I wouldn't punch.
Anybody want to talk Jennifer Weiner off the ledge?
Say what you want, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was fantastic and he's great on a lot of different levels.
So is "Man Getting Hit By Football".
Are we talking about the George C. Scott version?
'The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,' derided as his first right-wing tract by Salman Rushdie, actually puts this into practice: the narrator deceives the reader, fesses up midway through the novel, and it changes everything. I don't think I've read something that daring that is still so digestible and true-seeming and unpretentious in its delivery since.
Oh, and it's basically a gossipy book about Trotskyites.