In his 2011 Nobel Lecture, In Praise of Reading and Fiction, Mario Vargas Llosa said that literature can change reality. Because it "dissipates chaos, beautifies ugliness, eternalizes the moment and turns death into a passing spectacle." The Peruvian writer, a great leader of contemporary Hispanic literature and winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize, died in Lima, on Sunday, April 13. He was 89 years old.
The notion that literature can change someone was a revelation he'd had when he was very young, "at the age of 5, in Bolivia." "It was in 1941, in Cochabamba, in Brother Justiniano's class," he told Le Monde one day, in his elegant apartment on Rue Saint-Sulpice, in Paris's 6th arrondissement. This shock, he insisted, was "the most important thing that ever happened to [him]." He had understood then that a sentence could be experienced physically. He understood how you could sweat out blood and water while reading Les Misérables, "dragging the inert body of Marius along like a cross, through the sewers of Paris," or even calm your fear of flying with a novel by Alejo Carpentier when whiskey, sleeping pills and anxiolytics had failed ("How I Lost My Fear of Flying," his essay published in 2007).
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