Word: llosa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was a spiritual fugitive of another kind, a pre-Marxist socialist visionary who traveled across provincial France in the 1840s, preaching a gospel of class justice and the liberation of women. In The Way to Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 373 pages) Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, onetime presidential hopeful and perennial Nobel candidate, lightly fictionalizes their stories in alternating chapters, portraits of two literally kindred souls in revolt against the horsewhips and hypocrisy of the bourgeois order. Both of them rejected the world as they found it--repressed, greedy, deaf to the higher...
...chapters devoted to Tristan, who died four years before her grandson was born, Vargas Llosa reimagines 1844, the year of her death from typhoid at the age of 41. Tristan spends most of it traveling around southern France, pleading her vision of a cooperative future to small, mostly uncomprehending audiences. Years earlier she had fled her abusive husband, taking their small daughter Aline, Gauguin's mother. Tristan thinks back on the odyssey that then took her as far as Peru, where she went in hope of securing an inheritance from her late Peruvian father. The money was denied...
...Gauguin the road to salvation is through the senses, and it takes him far from weary Europe. It's in his part of the story, so full of the contradictions of this yearning, difficult man, that Vargas Llosa makes the book come alive. Gauguin arrives in a paradise that is already lost to the corruptions imported by French colonial administrators and missionaries. In search of a truly unspoiled culture, he eventually sets off for the even more isolated Marquesas with his paintings and collection of pornographic postcards. Two years later he dies there, blind and covered with syphilitic sores...
...Llosa: “We should get a trophy...
...Llosa: “When we see each other—at a party or in someone’s room—it’s not a surprise...