Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize in literature is welcome for several reasons. It is, first, a well-deserved honor for a brilliant, sensitive, and meticulous writer. I have read all of Vargas Llosa's novels at least once, and I have yet to find a false or poor sentence. The technique in which he, seemingly effortlessly, interlaces scenes from periods years apart in the same chapter is but one example of his superb craftsmanship. The novels are made like fine Swiss watches.
The prize will also bring Vargas Llosa's work and his thinking on literature to a wider audience. His Nobel lecture, on the importance of fiction and reading, can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/25tkp82. It gives some of his personal history and illuminates the motivations behind his work. Those motivations are at least as old as Virgil, which is why no matter when Vargas Llosa's books are set they all seem timeless.
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