On December 7, 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel lLecture is a
resounding tribute to fiction’s power to inspire readers to
greater ambition, to dissent, and to political action. “We
would be worse than we are without the good books we have
read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and
the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even
exist,” Vargas Llosa writes. “Like writing, reading is a
protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in
fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no
need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does
not satisfy our thirst for the absolute—the foundation of
the human condition—and should be better.” Vargas Llosa’s
lecture is a powerful argument for the necessity of
literature in our lives today. For, as he eloquently writes,
“literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and
happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression.”
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