When news of the Nobel Prize reached Mario Vargas Llosa in New York, it found him doing what he has done all his life: reading and writing. That autumn, he was teaching two courses on fiction at Princeton University and had started his day early to prepare a class on the importance of point of view in fiction, which he was going to illustrate with examples from Alejo Carpentier. He later described how. during those early hours. the rereading of El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1949) had worked its magic on him. But that fateful morning. the pleasure of reading which has been so important to him throughout his life was thoroughly disturbed. Vargas Llosa has always believed in literature as a vocation requiring the writer's full dedication. an activity which structures the entire life and needs to be pursued with discipline and total commitment. He has modelled himself on the French writer Gustave Flaubert who regarded creating fiction as an exclusive. all-encompassing endeavour. not to be shared with other distracting activities. ‘Writing is the commitment of your entire personality. and I think it's the only way you can succeed as a writer – with discipline and also [with a certain] stubbornness’. Vargas Llosa told his students at Princeton. But from the moment the news of the award became public. reading and writing. those quiet. solitary activities which. nevertheless. can be enormously pleasurable and enriching. became impossible.