MARIO VARGAS LLOSA ON ROGER CASEMENT

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In British traitor/Irish hero Roger Casement, the Nobel Laureate has found a riveting subject, says Mark Lawson The main job of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, is reading. However, they are also called upon for one vital piece of writing: summing up the winner’s work in the short prize citation that will be quoted around the globe. In the case of Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel laureate, the committee commended his depiction of “structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat”. The judges were clearly thinking of Llosa novels such as Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), which dramatises the Peruvian dictator Manuel Odría, and The Feast of the Goat (2000), which depicts Rafael Trujillo, who seized power in the Dominican Republic. But, spookily, those lines about the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat could serve as a perfect capsule review of The Dream of the Celt, the first novel the writer has released since taking the prize. MORE >