The Nobel Prize for Literature 2010

When Najib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, John Dunkelberger (the recently retired hero of collection development at my library) was traveling in Egypt. He scoured the bookstores of Cairo for English translations of Mahfouz’s novels to bring back to the library.

Mahfouz was virtually unknown in the United States at the time, and this gave the Urbana Free Library the premiere collection in the country. This brief-but-radiant moment of glory peaked with a call from the Library of Congress asking to see it.

No such luck this year: Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the latest Nobel winner for literature, is already well-known in the United States and elsewhere, and our collection, while substantial, is not at all unique.



All of the articles on this year’s prize mention the same two novels: “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” a comic autobiographical novel about illicit love and soap operas, and “The Feast of the Goat,” a political novel about Trujillo’s reign in the Dominican Republic. These are great works, but he wrote many others.

Vargas Llosa’s latest translated novel, “The Bad Girl,” for example, is a tale of obsessive love, an exploration of identity and the definition of self, and a sweeping look at the politics and culture of the last half of the 20th century.

The Peruvian narrator of this saga first falls in love with “Lily” (the bad girl) as a teenager. Lily is the new girl at school, supposedly from Chile. While she does not fall in love with him, she enjoys and encourages his devotion. Eventually, Lily is exposed as a fraud and vanishes.

Our brokenhearted narrator ends up in Paris, where he begins to build an adult life and a career as a freelance translator and interpreter. And then the bad girl reappears. She has a new name and a new identity, but she is still more than willing to make use of a still-smitten good boy.

Brutally honest, she makes it clear that the life of wealth, pleasure and adventure that she wants is not to be found with him. He doesn’t care; it is his destiny to love her. And soon, of course, she vanishes again.

This pattern repeats itself, over and over. As the years go by, the stakes get higher and higher; the narrator struggles, but always succumbs. It is as if he has no other home.

As a Peruvian in Paris, he is a foreigner. He comes to see his life as a translator as “another way of always being a foreigner, of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”

With the bad girl, he at least speaks in his own voice, with his own words. Besides, maybe someday she really will come to stay.

Vargas Llosa is a marvelous writer, and in this rich novel, he is, in the words of reviewers, “at the top of his game.”

If you haven’t read him before, it’s a good place to start. My personal favorite, though, is “The War of the End of the World,” a monumental epic telling of the rise of a Messianic figure among the poor in a remote area of Brazil as the 19th century draws to an end.

The old political order in Brazil was crumbling: In 1888, slavery was abolished, and in 1889, the empire of Brazil became a republic. Economic decline in the state of Bahia was further exacerbated by recurring drought.

The counselor and his small band of followers would sweep into a village and immediately begin repairing and restoring its church. Wayward priests heard themselves denounced from their own pulpits. The end was near, and there was work to be done. When the counselor swept out again, the band would be a bit larger.

Eventually, the counselor begins to build a permanent settlement in a hard-hit area called Canudos. His message is simple and austere: In this community, there will be no money, no property ownership, no marriage, no taxes. They are preparing for the end and the return.

His followers are the downtrodden of the forsaken: prostitutes, freaks, bandits and beggars. Their numbers swell to 15,000, and the government, in fear, sends in the military. The counselor’s followers turn the ingenuity they brought to building their community to defending it and they win.

Larger and larger military units are sent to lay siege to Canudos. Eventually it truly is the “War of the End of the World.”

The author has referred to this as his favorite of his novels. It is often described as an indictment of the ideological fanaticism that has plagued Latin America throughout its history, but I found it a more sympathetic portrait than that.

Like all great authors, Vargas Llosa can engender love for his characters, and love them I did. The Little Blessed One, the repentant Abbot Joao, the Lion of Natuba, the bandit Pajeu, Big Joao, the former slave: their only sin is their refusal to surrender.

The inevitable tragedy is unspeakably sad, the reading of it, unforgettable.