In a civilization obsessed with spectacle, he fears that in the future the “arts and letters” will be rendered so banal that they will become irrelevant. So much so, that culture has been “discreetly emptied of its content”.Īs Vargas Llosa sees it, the only value modern society recognises is commercial value and that as a result culture has been reduced to mere entertainment – a means of escaping the existential ennui of our intellectually impoverished lives. After briefly surveying earlier attempts to understand culture, including works by TS Eliot, George Steiner, Guy Debord and Frédéric Martel, he concludes that in his lifetime it has undergone a “traumatic change”. The Peruvian author, who was born in 1936 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, begins by discussing the “metamorphosis of what was still understood as culture when my generation was in school or at university, and the motley definitions that have replaced it”. In this powerful polemic first published in Spanish ten years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa explores what he considers to be the demise of culture. All this alongside the exposure of the unfairness and hypocrisy of the world and the riot of human emotions, that somehow the season of Christmas exacerbates, intensifies and exposes, especially this particular Christmas for Billy Furlong.Īll Book on One episodes of Small Things Like These read by Claire Keegan are available here.Notes on the Death of Culture Mario Vargas Llosa Small Things Like These catches the rituals, routines and weathers of the days before Christmas in small town Ireland: the switching on of the Christmas lights, the writing of letters to Santy, making the Christmas cake, the queues and banter between customers in the barbers, shopping for presents, approaching midnight mass, and falling snow.
As he does his deliveries, Furlong 'feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. He was brought up in the protestant house of Mrs Wilson out the road where his mother worked until she died when he was twelve and he doesn't know who his father was. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, lives with his wife Eileen and their girls in town. It is set in an Irish town in 1985 during the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Small Things Like These was universally declared to be a classic when published last year. A specially seasonal Book on One comes to RTÉ Radio 1 this Christmas season, with author Claire Keegan reading her novel Small Things Like These in its entirety - listen to all the episodes broadcast to date here.
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