Five days after the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he walked into a Princeton classroom where 25 students awaited their weekly seminar on the magical realism of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
And then, said one astounded undergraduate, he pretended nothing had happened.
“Thank you very, very much,” he said, smiling broadly, according to students who were there and had presented him with a card and a spread of baked goods. “We’ll eat this during the break. But for now, let’s start class.”