On December 7, 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel lLecture is a resounding tribute to fictionβs power to inspire readers to greater ambition, to dissent, and to political action. βWe 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,β Vargas Llosa writes. βLike 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 absoluteβthe foundation of the human conditionβand should be better.β Vargas Llosaβs lecture is a powerful argument for the necessity of literature in our lives today. For, as he eloquently writes, βliterature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression.β
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