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Mario Vargas Llosa on the purpose of fiction
Published: 10/8/2010 8:08 AM
Last Modified: 10/8/2010 8:08 AM

Mario Vargas Llosa in 1985

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature this week, honoring a body of work that includes some of the greatest novels on Latin American literature: "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," "Who Killed Palomino Molero?" (to name two personal favorites), "The Feast of the Goat," "The Green House," "Death in the Andes" and "The War of the End of the World."

As has been the case with the Nobel choices of late, Vargas Llosa's politics (he mounted an unsuccessful campaign to become president of his native Peru in the 1990s) played probably as much a role in his receiving the award as the quality of his novels, essays and other writings (he's published more than 30 books).

As Vargas Llosa once wrote, in a 1984 essay in the New York Times Book Review, published around the time of U.S. publication of his novel "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta":

“The lies in novels are not gratuitous — they fill in the insufficiencies of life,” he wrote. “Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels perform no service at all. Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels. Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.”

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James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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