| Claire Keegan |
This month’s best paperbacks
November and December
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some excellent new paperbacks, from powerful essay collections to a Booker-shortlisted novel
| Mario Vargas Llosa |
Notes on the Death of Culture Mario Vargas Llosa
A powerful polemic
In this powerful polemic first published in Spanish ten years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa explores what he considers to be the demise of culture. The Peruvian author, who was born in 1936 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, begins by discussing the “metamorphosis of what was still understood as culture when my generation was in school or at university, and the motley definitions that have replaced it”. After briefly surveying earlier attempts to understand culture, including works by TS Eliot, George Steiner, Guy Debord and Frédéric Martel, he concludes that in his lifetime it has undergone a “traumatic change”. So much so, that culture has been “discreetly emptied of its content”.