Gopnik on the Nobel

From the great Adam Gopnik's recent piece on the Nobel Prize in Literature, in which he explains his theory that the prize (and the list of those who've won it) would make more sense if it were named after Victor Hugo:

When this year’s prize was announced, last Thursday, it went to a writer who, if not a North American (again), is at least familiar to North Americans: the Peruvian novelist and man of letters Mario Vargas Llosa. So all hail Vargas Llosa, whom even his noisier left-wing critics have to regard as exactly the kind of writer the prize ought to go to: one with a host of well-regarded novels (“The Time of the Hero,” “Conversation in the Cathedral,” the screen-adapted “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “The Feast of the Goat”) and a sense of social responsibility (he ran seriously for, and lost badly, the Presidency of Peru), not to mention a lively personal life that includes once punching out another future laureate with an equally impressive triple-barrelled moniker, Gabriel García Márquez, reportedly over something to do with Mrs. Vargas Llosa. The Nobel thus not only crowns a career but provides the basis for a fine future Javier Bardem/Antonio Banderas movie. (“The only thing they cared for more than Latin American epic fiction was . . . the honor of a woman.”)