WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
**
A provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on
the decline of intellectual life**
In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly
rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a
mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of
Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation--penned
by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest
novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today.
Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot--whose essay Notes Toward a Definition
of Culture is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to
describe has since vanished--Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill
effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the
figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and
women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations;
today they have all but disappeared from public debate.
But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is
not content to merely sign a petition; he will not bite his tongue. A
necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly
translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our
time and culture.
