Thursday afternoon, it was announced that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Admittedly, I’m what you might call a fanatic of his work, so I promptly started leaving “oh hell yes!” and “woooo-hooo” comments on blogs covering the award. I found that not everyone shared my views. Maybe they had fingers crossed for Cormac McCarthy or Tomas Tranströmer, but quite a few people commented that he was an obscure author (phrased, I believe, as “obscure much?”).

I’m not going to argue that an author with more than 30 novels, plays and essays translated into dozens of languages isn’t “obscure”—that would be totally unnecessary. Instead, I’ll tell you about Mario Vargas Llosa and some of his work.

First, you should know that he got into a fistfight with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which resulted in an on-going feud.
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Some might call it a Dominican Series. On a recent set of flights to Tejas, I decided to read Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. His characterization of Trujillo, Trujillo’s dictatorship, his assassins, and his successor were so complex and interesting that during the flights back, I decided to pick up Junot Díaz’ The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz spared even fewer punches with the dictatorship, calling Trujillo “Truzilla,” and used such an invigorating style to discuss the diaspora, that I was hooked into a full-blown Dominican phase. I just started reading Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, though I’ve had a few moments when I’ve thought about leaving it in the park for someone else to read. The Alvarez book I’d be the least likely to recommend.
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