Today Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa became the sixth Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mario Vargas Llosa is more than a trenchant novelist, he is a political icon who represents just how far Latin America has come; from strident leftist to pragmatic conservative.
His novels are deeply critical of a military tradition in Latin America that starts with academy, ends with a military aristocracy surrounding a caudillo, and sews corruption all along the way. Among the pantheon of Latin American literary greats, his work falls more on the realist end of the “magical realism” spectrum.
This reduces to one the list of Peruvians to whom a Nobel is overdue…Hernando de Soto.
