Word: llosa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mario Vargas Llosa's autobiographical novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter amorously paired a young man with an older woman. In The Perpetual Orgy, a highly original work of nonfiction, part literary testament and part critical study of Madame Bovary, the author confesses to carrying a torch for the novel's heroine, soon to be 130. Peru's Vargas Llosa belongs to a long line of Emma Bovary's professional admirers. Gustave Flaubert's scandalous character has vamped the imaginations and intellects of writers from Baudelaire to Woody Allen, whose l971 short story The Kugelmass Episode conjures a contemporary character...
...Vargas Llosa would agree. He was a student in Paris when he first encountered Emma nearly 30 years ago. Of subsequent rereadings, he writes, "I have always had the sensation that I was discovering secret facets, unpublished details." This feeling is especially keen when the novel is discussed along with Flaubert's intimate correspondence. Vargas Llosa does this with elan and insight not unexpected from one of the world's most accomplished novelists...
...relationship between Flaubert and Emma Bovary emerges as a passionate substitute for real life. "The one way of tolerating existence," he wrote, "is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy." In turn, Vargas Llosa pulls off a great escape by transforming criticism into a sensual romp. It is a delightful experience, for it is not often that an international man of letters admits to preferring pornography to science fiction and sentimental stories to horror tales. Perhaps even more daring is his avowal of old-fashioned formalism, of books "that are rigorously and symmetrically constructed, with a definite...
...REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA, Mario Vargas Llosa THE SPORTSWRITER, Richard Ford...
Alejandro is an illusive character because his friends and enemies tell contradictory stories about him, but more important because the narrator repeatedly reminds the reader that his investigations are a preparation for lying, for conjuring a fiction. Such modernist hugger-mugger has great potential for tedium. But Vargas Llosa's lucid intellect and technical gifts allow him to toy with uncertainty and shuffle time with deceptive ease. A good deal of Peru's mournful history and wretched present are economically conveyed. Leaving the Museum of the Inquisition, the narrator is confronted by a score of beggars. "They constitute a sort...