I found this book on my shelf by Vargas Llosa, denouncing the banality of contemporary culture. I remember reading it before and hating it, and I thought I had written this post many years ago, but I'm not finding it.
It seems the perfect example of a book that forms part of the very culture it is denouncing. He doesn't ever engage with any aspect of contemporary culture. Novels, films, musical compositions, the visual and performing arts. None of this appears any place in his work. "Culture" is a pure abstraction for him, a stick to beat up aspects of contemporary life he doesn't like.
Nor does he do any well-developed essayistic writing: these are all just newspaper articles of the kind that famous authors write in Spain for El País on a daily basis. Of course, his reactionary political stances do not win him any favor with me, but I would have liked to read a reactionary thinker who can at least develop ideas in a more sophisticated way.
A similar decline has occurred in his novelistic writing. My brother gave me a signed copy of a MVLL novel after he won the Nobel Prize, and it was unreadable. I mean even worse than the Tía Julia and Elogio de la madrastra. If he represents high culture, then what hope is there?
1 comment:
Most of Vargas Llosa is junk, especially from the late 80s on. Even on serious subjects, all he has are a soap opera.
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