Why is Literature Important?

"Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and the innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit

Lays its honours at their feet."

W.H.Auden

"In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. Jan 1939)

Mario Vargas Llosa

For once, everyone agrees. Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize is richly deserved. He is supremely accomplished as a novelist, literary critic and journalist. He is respected, well liked, generous to a fault to his fellow writers. His politics may not be to everyone's liking, but at least he stays clear of compromising friendships with the likes of Fidel Castro. He is is every sense a cosmopolitan writer. Strictly wedded to the realist novel, as practiced by the great XIXth century masters - Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, whom he worships - he is equally at home in Peru, in Paris or in the Congo, the scene of his latest novel, due in November. He writes a beautiful, limpid, compelling spanish. Once one starts reading, the precision and the musicality of his style, as well as his impeccable storytelling technique rarely fail to carry one through to the end. A literary genius? Perhaps not. But certainly a great writer and a highly respectable man.