Surely one of the most entertaining novels ever written. A sheer joy to read.
Mario Vargas Llosa tells us: "With Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
my idea was to write a novel with stereotypes, with clichés, with all
the instruments of the popular novel, the soap opera, and the radio
serial, but in such a way that these elements could be transformed into
an artistic work, into something personal and original.”
The result: a comic novel that's both highly polished literature and fun, fun, fun, a comic novel that's actually funny.
Did you know the 1990 film Tune in Tomorrow
starring Keanu Reeves, Peter Falk and Barbara Hershey is based on the
novel? I'm generally not a moviegoer but I did catch this one, the
funniest movie I've ever seen.
Back on the novel. We're in 1950s
Lima, Peru and the novel's narrator is eighteen-year-old Mario, writer
of news blurbs for a Lima radio station (actually, Mario simply rewords
existing bulletins so the station can't be sued for plagiarism).
However, Mario's real passion is fiction; he submits short stories to
local literary journals; they're usually rejected but Mario presses on,
dreaming of some day becoming a famous novelist living in a Parisian
garret.
But Mario's heart is about to be set aflame. His
beautiful, saucy, sexy thirty-two-year-old Aunt Julia, a recent
divorcee, makes her way from Bolivia to Lima to live among all their
upper-class relatives, a brood reveling in family gossip. As if an
episode from a soap opera, Mario falls ever so deeply in love with Julia
(a sister of his uncle's, thus an aunt by marriage, no by blood).
Speaking
of soap opera, there's another recent transplant from Bolivia to Lima:
Pedro Camacho, a scriptwriter, an artist obsessed with his craft - and
that's obsessed as in working seventeen hours a day, seven days a week.
But
Mario Vargas Llosa's novel is much more than simply Mario and Aunt
Julia and Pedro Camacho - the even numbered chapters feature separate
dramas of other men, women and children. We're eventually given the
context of these dramas, the 'how' and 'why' they appear in the novel in
the first place, but our more complete understanding unfolds
progressively, chapter by chapter.
I purposely kept this review
short. By my reckoning, a reader is best discovering the details of the
multiple intertwining plots page by page.
The writing sizzles - and it's oh, so tasty. Thus I'll conclude with a trio of direct quotes:
Mario
on Pedro Camacho - "For him, to live was to write. Whether or not his
works would endure didn't matter in the least to him. Once his scripts
had been broadcast, he forgot about them. He assured me he didn't have a
single copy of any of his serials. They had been composed with the
tacit conviction that they would cease to exist as such once they had
been digested by the public."
Mario on writing: "It was becoming
clearer and clearer to me each day that the only thing I wanted to be
in life was a writer, and I was also becoming more and more convinced
each day that the only way to be one was to devote oneself heart and
soul to literature. I didn't want in the least to be a hack writer or a
part-time one, but a real one, like - who? The person I 'd met who came
closest to being this full-time writer, obsessed and impassioned by his
vocation, was the Bolivian author of radio serials: that was why he
fascinated me so."
Mario on his relationship with Aunt Julia - "I
think that what had begun as a game little by little became serious in
the course of these chaste meetings in the smoke-filled cafés of
downtown Lima. It was in such places that, without or realizing it, we
gradually fell in love."
Mario Vargas Llosa, photo of the artist as a joyful young man
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