We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

These novels have a much lighter farcical and comic tone characteristics of postmodernism. This early piece gained wide public attention and immediate success. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is considered one of the most striking examples of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be used in literature.

Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance revolt and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros literally The City and the Dogs 1963/1966) The Green House (La casa verde 1965/1968) and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral 1969/1975). Like many Latin American writers Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life he has gradually moved from the political left towards liberalism or neoliberalism a definitively more conservative political position.