Doris Lessing is no doubt a deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and given her advancing age the Swedish Academy may well have felt that recognizing her was urgent. But I can’t help noting what the Washington Post’s book critic, Jonathan Yardley, said on Sunday:

In the world at large [Mario Vargas Llosa] is known as one of the leading writers in the Latin American literary “Boom,” his acclaim today probably exceeded only by that lavished upon Gabriel Garcia Marquez. That he has not been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature is nothing short of scandalous.

After deploring the “many nonentities to whom the prize has gone in recent years,” Yardley suggests a possible reason for the continuing error:

Doubtless the prize went to Garcia Marquez on merit, but doubtless as well his cozy relationship with Fidel Castro helped his cause; Vargas Llosa by contrast is of a more conservative persuasion, and this the complacently ideological Swedes do not countenance, much less honor.

If Yardley read Vargas Llosa’s nonfiction as carefully as his fiction, he would note that the great author considers himself a liberal, not a conservative. But the social democrats of Sweden dislike real liberalism as much as conservatism.