Cheers for Mario Vargas Llosa

It is gratifying to see that the great Peruvian novelist and sometime libertarian politician Mario Vargas Llosa finally was chosen for the Nobel prize in Literature. Based on his dozens of novels, screenplays and plays, as well as an impressive group of philosophical and political essays, he has long deserved the prize. I was impressed some years ago by "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," which was entertaining even though I didn't realize at the time that it was very loosely autobiographical. I'll have to reread it with that knowledge in mind.

For a Register editorial I spoke with Mario's son, Alvaro, who lives in DC and works for the Independent Institute. He was very excited, though he told me he had long ago given up hope thast his father would get the Nobel, given the quirky leftiness of the Swedish Academy, which seem to prefer obscure fashionable leftists, the more clumsy in their didacticness (is that a word? Is now.) the better. He looks forward to a family reunion (his siblings are almost all in different countries) in Sweden in December. I had met Alvaro briefly some years ago in an undisclosed location after being told that just now Alvaro didn't want people to know where he was. Since then he has been quite public, working for the Independent Institute on global prosperity issues, writing a column the New Republic often carries, and doing a special on Latin America for National Geographic. He's a bright and competent advocate of undivided -- economic as well as social and cultural -- liberty and a credit to his family.