WASHINGTON — Four years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a book that said the world was going to hell. Journalists were sleaze-mongers and politicians hopeless. Civilization had collapsed into spectacle.

Then he became a spectacle himself when he left his wife of 50 years for another woman. Maybe that’s not surprising. The Peruvian writer was a leading candidate for his country’s presidency in 1990, is the last survivor of a literary movement that re-energized the novel in our time and is probably the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to compare the joys of writing, in his 2010 Nobel lecture, to “making love to the woman you love, for days, weeks, months, without stopping.”

The media, transfixed by his new romance, set about converting his private life into entertainment.

“I wrote that book” — it was published in English last summer as “Notes on the Death of Culture” — “and suddenly I became a kind of victim,” Mr. Vargas Llosa said in an interview. “My private life was not private anymore. It was in magazines, in newspapers, all kinds of stupid gossip. I was defenseless against it. I am a living demonstration that what I wrote is true.” He laughed, a deep rich rumble.

Mr. Vargas Llosa, who turned 80 last month, came here this week for a more benign form of spectacle, a prize ceremony. The author of the Tolstoyan epic “The War of the End of the World” and the comic romp “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” among many other books, Mr. Vargas Llosa was the recipient of the Library of Congress’s Living Legend award. Created for the institution’s bicentennial in 2000, the award was initially given in abundance. This time around, only Mr. Vargas Llosa got it.