Congrats to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa on his new status as Nobel Laureate in Literature. Of his work, I know only his War of the End of the World, wonderful title for a wonderful book. He's an anomaly in Latin America for having grown up politically, starting out on the left as so many of us do, but slowly coming to the realization that communism and its offshoots are theoretically flawed in the extreme and, when practically applied, result in sheer insanity and massive suffering. In MVL's case, this epiphany led to a public fistfight with his former friend and ideological Castroite Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Mario, apparently, decked Gabriel (the previous Latin American writer to be enNobeled, in 1982). But Mario was decked in turn, metaphorically, when he ran against the charismatic Alberto Fujimori for the presidency of Peru in 1990, losing heavily. Fujimori went on to heroically defeat the maniacal Maoist Shining Path guerrillas but he's now in the slam, found guilty of massive corruption. His story and the entire history of modern Peru read like a real-life Vargas Llosa novel.