The Aesthetic Stalinists Are Out in Force Tonight!

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Well-deserved. The War of the End of the World is one of the most brilliant novels I've ever read and I've enjoyed other Vargas Llosa novels as well.

Vargas Llosa is also a right-winger. And that fact has the aesthetic Stalinists on the right jumping up and down. Edroso has a good run-down of the idiocy. But Thers found the cake-taker of the evening:

Vargas Llosa is not only a white male, he’s also a free-market libertarian who believes in democracy. His books have been bestsellers for decades.

Fantastic. Vargas Llosa's race (and in the racial paradigm of the United States, is any Peruvian white?), gender, and economic and political beliefs determine the quality of his work. Of course, I don't think Vargas Llosa's books have been "bestsellers" at all but whatever.

Really, I'm right there with the aesthetic Stalinists--if you can't judge the quality of a book by its politics, you might actually have to read the thing. And we can't have that.