Making its English debut, “Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society” sews together Vargas Llosa’s recent musings on the loss of a common cultural canon of books, as well as loss of ground (loss of interest) in other “high” arts, such as painting and classical music.

The book surveys the great threats to culture mounted by technology, populism, political correctness and multiculturalism. But too often the culprits behind these trends are a lot of usual straw men and scapegoats: Muslims, post-modernists, anthropologists and, implicitly, critics of colonialism.

Although problems in publishing and literary culture are real enough, one gathers that Vargas Llosa, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature, decided where he stood on these matters long before the current crop of problems. His book feels anachronistic, a new book that reads as old. Given that the argument is made up of essays sewn together from various periods, his prescriptions often mismatch his diagnoses.

As a latter-day culture warrior, Vargas Llosa spends much of the book blaming changes in the landscape on the seemingly hurt feelings of Western culture. Non-Western cultures, you see, must be called out for what they are: primitive, inferior.

Our political correctness, he writes, “has ended up convincing us that it is arrogant, dogmatic, colonialist and even racist to speak of superior and inferior cultures and even about modern and primitive cultures. According to this archangelic conception, all cultures in their own way and in their own context, are equal, equivalent expressions of the marvelous diversity of humanity.”

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