Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate who died this past Sunday, spent the better part of his literary career novelizing the history of Latin America.
It's curious, then, that when he reflected on Latin America's traumatic past in a 1995 essay for Reason, Vargas Llosa diagnosed its root cause as an excess of fiction.
Vargas Llosa agreed that when Spanish inquisitors set about suppressing the novel in their new colonies, they were targeting a subversive art form. A classical liberal through and through, he saw only problems and unintended consequences resulting from this government prohibition.
