Congrats, Mario Vargas Llosa

It is Nobel awards season and today the Swedish Academy announced Mario Vargas Llosa has been award the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.

According to the NYT report, Vargas Llosa, a 74-year-old Peruvian,

is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabríel Garcia Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”

My experience with South American authors is woeful. Off the top of my head, my only South American readings have been One Hundred Years of Solitude, a few other Garcia Márquez short stories, and the massive collected fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, which I did not care for. Surrealism and magic realism are not my thing, and though I know not all South American authors are surrealists or magic realists, I have shied away from them. However, from what I have read, Vargas Llosa piques the realist in me, so this year I may actually come through on the promise of reading some of the Nobel Prize winner’s work.

Plus, I like this quote from the NYT story:

In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.”