Conversacion en La Catedral

     Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel prize, and a few months later this book (Conversación en La Catedral) came to me through a sad circumstance.  It was a book I'd always meant to read and this settled it.  I was predicting a hard slog, but it's really a novel.  As of page 287, I'm engrossed and recommend it enthusiastically.
     The first book I ever read in Spanish, just for pleasure, was La tia Julia y el escribidor (also by Vargas Llosa).  The novel fills H (husband) with a sense of nostalgia because he remembers the radio plays and the culture of the book's setting.  For me, the nostalgia is about thinking of how little I understood about anything when I read that book at twenty.  But, anyway, I liked it.
      Too bad for Vargas Llosa (ha ha) that I also read  La niña mala - which I thought was ... I don't know .... almost perfunctory.  It seemed to be a kind of Latin American Forest Gump one life through history.  It feels unfair to say this because, for all I know, it was a very personal kind of chronicle of the author's era.
      Lo siento, Sr. Vargas Llosa.
     It makes me feel a bit better to add what Zadie Smith said yesterday on an interview in NPR.  She was saying that book critics who are also novelists, as opposed to those who are only literary critics, have a better sense of how a BAD book happens.  I can't do justice to her explanation, but the idea is clear I think: the author is incapable of seeing what she has created at first.  Only years later does the author have the necessary distance to read her own book.  I think for very successful authors there must be a real danger of this because they aren't obligated to listen to anybody tell them that they've gone astray with book X or Y. 
      That is, the fact that La niña mala was mediocre is almost to be expected.  These things happen, according to Zadie Smith, and the successful author faces a particular peril according to me (and who knows how many others). 
     Here's another group who (which?  that?) can write as badly as we want: bloggers with no readers - which is why I'm going to spend hours toiling over this last line...  Oh God.  Must prevail.  So profound my thoughts.

       He who struggleth not, knows but plastic roses.  As these can never bring forth his blood, no chemical                   perfume therein can bring true pleasure.

I'm considering this more symbolically charged version (a bit more obtuse)

       He who hath ne'er struggled, knows but plastic roses. As these exact not his beating red tears,
              no essence of this imitation of nature's beauty can truly gratify.

Is "red beating tears" (i.e. blood) better than beating red tears?  I went with the latter because the "red beating" part started to sound like McCarthyists to me.  God, great writing is a burden.