Mario Vargas Llosa, Hola! and the shallow reading of a review

Joshua Cohen’s review of Notes on the Death of a Culture makes a serious point about the mixing up of highbrow and lowbrow – that Vargas Llosa missed it is revealing

The New York Times’s books section this week published a letter from Mario Vargas Llosa protesting about a review of his book Notes on the Death of Culture – a polemic in the tradition of TS Eliot and George Steiner against a dumbed-down world of “spectacle” that shuns or scoffs at serious thought and difficult art – in the previous issue. At the end of the review, the novelist Joshua Cohen suggested there might be something hypocritical about Vargas Llosa’s condemnation of the infiltration of popular culture’s values into high culture and in particular his trashing of trashy journalism. The 79-year-old, he pointed out, had recently appeared in Hola! (the Spanish parent magazine of Hello!) in an “exclusive story” revealing his new relationship with the socialite Isabel Preysler, ex-wife and mother respectively of the pop stars Julio and Enrique Iglesias, and told the celebrity weekly the affair was “going very well”.

Enraged, the 2010 Nobel literature laureate thundered that he was “flabbergasted to learn that this kind of gossip can find its way into a respectable publication such as the Book Review” - a “slanderous and perfidious” instance of the convergence of posh and pop that his book inveighs against. “I have never had a Twitter account”, he insisted, and “have never sold a story to Hola!”, so Cohen had been wrong to assert (on the basis of a Daily Mail article, which recycled allegations in the Spanish press) that he had tweeted about the affair and been paid for the photo-feature. Both claims were deleted from the review, which now appears online with a humiliating triple correction beneath it, as originally it also misspelt Preysler’s name.

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