We at Harvard University Press would like to offer our fond congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa on having been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon hearing the news this morning, HUP Editor-in-Chief Susan Wallace Boehmer understood, finally, why she’s sought to make permanent a piece of digital ephemera.
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Almost exactly three years ago, I received a lovely message on my voice mail at HUP. “Hello Susan. This is Mario. Mario Vargas Llosa ...” I listened and then saved it, and I’ve resaved it every thirteen days since. Eighty-five times I’ve hit the 9 button on my phone, to keep Harvard from consigning this precious connection to some telephonic graveyard.
Believe me, more than once I’ve asked myself where this obsessive-compulsive behavior was coming from. Today, with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I got my answer. I don’t know how long “Mario. Mario Vargas Llosa” has been on the short list in Stockholm, but in Cambridge he’s been on my short list of Most Wonderful Authors I Have Ever Worked With for four years.
It started when I had the privilege of editing a book of his essays, Wellsprings, which grew out of the Richard Ellmann Lectures at Emory University in 2006. I—along with fourteen hundred others—packed into Atlanta’s Glenn Memorial Church to be captivated for three days, as Vargas Llosa spoke about the three masters whose literary voices resonated in his own work. Of one of them, Cervantes, he had this to say: “It is easy to forget, in the midst of all this critical acclaim, that Cervantes was a person like all of us, faced with the pitfalls of an uncertain destiny, whose work was not conceived miraculously or by chance but was achieved through determination, hard work, craftsmanship, and patience.” On a morning that brings Mario—and the world—such fabulous news, I can’t think of a better description of the soft-spoken, generous man I briefly came to know.
So, to paraphrase my precious phone message: “Hello Mario. This is Susan. Susan Wallace Boehmer. I just wanted to tell you that I have heard about your Nobel Prize in Literature, and I like it very much. I think you have done a wonderful job. Thank you, Mario. I will call you later.”
