Word: llosa
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...novel is a bedazzlement of popular entertainment and what, after more than 50 resistant years, is still called experimental writing. Its author, Mario Vargas Llosa, 45, is a versatile Peruvian with a growing international reputation. His previous novels include The Time of the Hero, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral. The War of the End of the World, an untranslated novel of a 19th century peasant uprising in Brazil, is currently a bestseller in Spain and South America. His plays, criticism and topical articles appear regularly, and he recently wrote about the World Cup soccer matches for Barcelona...
...Lima, where Vargas Llosa lives with his wife and three children, he is not only a cultural celebrity but a man who is expected to have the answers to public questions. This is both the blessing and the burden of many writers in Latin America and Europe, where literature and politics retain close ties. For an author in a poor An dean country with a large uneducated Indian population, the is sues and responsibilities are sharpened. "If you are a writer," says Vargas Llosa, "you are a privileged man in this kind of society." Many of his conservative countrymen have...
Aunt Julia is set in that same period of the 1950s, though Odria and his political procurers are not in sight. Instead, Vargas Llosa's Lima is a bright tangle of characters: Indians from the mountains and the edge of the Amazon busy filling up new slums; a middle class trying to keep its balance in an unstable economy; and the rich preserving the good life and marrying off their daughters in style. There are shocks and bizarre surprises, but the prevailing atmosphere of the novel is a melancholy gaiety...
This is the city of the author's youth and early manhood, a fact conspicuously observed by a charming narrator named Mario. Vargas Llosa is an artful dissembler. He appears to have taken the defensible position that since most autobiographies are figments of self-serving imaginations, one might as well accept memory as a fiction machine and get on with it. Mercifully he lightens this intellectual load by turning his life into a soap opera and putting its popular conventions to higher literary uses. Banalities become oddly resonant and trivialities bristle with jeopardy. Episodes of scandal, lunacy and mayhem...
...resentful tone echoes Vargas Llosa novels in which Peru was often depicted as a parody society. Those books had powerful intentions, but they also had moments that recalled Peter De Vries' line about the writer who puts readers into a diving bell and takes them down three feet. Aunt Julia is an ingenious and delightful turnabout, a glass-bottom social comedy that offers some deep, dark perspectives to those who care to look down. -By R.Z. Sheppard...