Notes on the Death of Culture

The Peruvian Nobel laureate presents a collection of essays on the decline of intellectual life in the age of media spectacle.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.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. 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.But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.