A Case Study of Literary Karma

Two years ago Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yesterday, he celebrated his 76th birthday by donating 30,000 of his books to the library in Lima, his Peruvian hometown.

Instead of “man of letters,” can we start using the phrase “hero of letters?”

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When a Nobel-caliber author takes a standard romance and gives it Nobel-caliber thought, you get something rare: actual wisdom about how to love another person.

“In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It’s something that gives me what real life can’t give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.” -Mario Vargas Llosa

“In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It’s something that gives me what real life can’t give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa

“That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.” -Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist

“That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist

“The solution came in a most unexpected way, on a flight between Buenos Aires and Madrid which, by chance, was commemorating the first flight between those cities (by an Iberian Airline Douglas DC4) on 22 September 1946. I bought at Ezeiza airport a copy of a short novel by Alejo Carpentier that I had not read: The Kingdom of This World. Nothing had prepared me for the surprise. From the first lines of the story, which recreates the hallucinating life of Henri Christophe and the building of the famous Citadel in Haiti, this superbly written and even better constructed narration in which, as in all literary masterpieces, nothing could be added or taken away, absorbed me body and soul and took away my surroundings, transporting me, for the ten hours or so of the flight, away from the frozen starry night into a prodigious epic account of Haiti in the previous century, where the most ferocious violence intermingled with the most fevered imagination, and everyday and trivial events blurred into miracles and legends. I read the final lines when the plane touched down in Barajas; the book had lasted the flight, and had taken away my fear for the entire journey.” -Mario Vargas Llosa, “How I Lost My Fear of Flying”

“The solution came in a most unexpected way, on a flight between Buenos Aires and Madrid which, by chance, was commemorating the first flight between those cities (by an Iberian Airline Douglas DC4) on 22 September 1946. I bought at Ezeiza airport a copy of a short novel by Alejo Carpentier that I had not read: The Kingdom of This World. Nothing had prepared me for the surprise. From the first lines of the story, which recreates the hallucinating life of Henri Christophe and the building of the famous Citadel in Haiti, this superbly written and even better constructed narration in which, as in all literary masterpieces, nothing could be added or taken away, absorbed me body and soul and took away my surroundings, transporting me, for the ten hours or so of the flight, away from the frozen starry night into a prodigious epic account of Haiti in the previous century, where the most ferocious violence intermingled with the most fevered imagination, and everyday and trivial events blurred into miracles and legends. I read the final lines when the plane touched down in Barajas; the book had lasted the flight, and had taken away my fear for the entire journey.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa, “How I Lost My Fear of Flying”