Notes on the Death of Culture - by Mario Vargas Llosa (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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 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. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

Review Quotes

"Notes on the Death of Culture is a provocative essay collection on the fast decline of intellectual life, and one that manages the dual feat of shedding light while spreading gloom . . . And yet towards the end of these intelligent, penetrative, rigorous, but sporadically mournful essays we can detect a glimmer of hope." --Malcolm Forbes, The New Criterion

"Making Waves is fascinating . . . [It] is a diverse and representative volume that allows us, for the first time, to trace this enigmatic, often brilliant writer's . . . intellectual journey." --Jay Parini, The New York Times Book Review on Making Waves

About the Author

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.

John King is a professor of Latin American cultural history at the University of Warwick, England. He is the coeditor, with Efraín Kristal, of The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, and he has edited and translated several volumes of Vargas Llosa's essays, including Making Waves and Touchstones.