PD Smith £13.04 (RRP £14.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop In it he speaks movingly about how great novels lit an enduring fire in his imagination (“these books changed me, moulded me, made me”), and his conviction that such works should always lie at the very heart of our civilization: “nothing sharpens our senses or makes us more alert to the roots of cruelty, evil and violence than good literature”. But this idiosyncratic book – superbly translated by John King – ends on an uplifting note, with an impassioned speech delivered when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers in 1996. His prognosis for the future of culture is pessimistic. His anger at the trivialisation of the arts – and indeed other fields such as journalism – stems from his deeply-felt belief in its importance and his anger at its displacement. Vargas Llosa writes from the heart and there’s no doubting his love for great art and literature, and its unique ability to open people’s eyes to the reality of their lives. But today he claims that we have lost “this delicate substance that gives sense, content and an order to what we call civilization”. Though he accepts that often in the past only an elite could appreciate such culture, it still suffused the whole of society. Culture for Vargas Llosa is high culture, a creative vocation with an almost spiritual dimension, whose purpose is to find answers to ultimate questions about life that transcend mere material well-being. He dislikes the anthropological way in which culture is now defined, as everything that a community “says, does, fears or worships”. TS Eliot suggested that “culture may be described simply as that which makes life worth living”. In a civilization obsessed with spectacle, he fears that in the future the “arts and letters” will be rendered so banal that they will become irrelevant.

So much so, that culture has been “discreetly emptied of its content”.Īs Vargas Llosa sees it, the only value modern society recognises is commercial value and that as a result culture has been reduced to mere entertainment – a means of escaping the existential ennui of our intellectually impoverished lives. 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”. 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”. In this powerful polemic first published in Spanish ten years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa explores what he considers to be the demise of culture. Notes on the Death of Culture Mario Vargas Llosa

Claire keegan small things