Press Round Up

Here's a very limited list of articles and reactions on Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize.
Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Literature Prize
Nobel de littérature : Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel da Literatura para Mario Vargas Llosa
Y el ganador es… ¡Mario Vargas Llosa!
La fête à Vargas Llosa
Le Nobel 2010 s'appelle Vargas Llosa
Le prix Nobel de littérature décerné à Mario Vargas Llosa
Peruvian Vargas Llosa wins literature Nobel
Nobel de littérature 2010 : Mario Vargas Llosa, éternel révolté
Le prix Nobel de littérature 2010 attribué au Péruvien Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa: a worthy Nobel prize for literature winner?
Nobel : la surprise Vargas llosa
Le Nobel à Mario Vargas Llosa
Y el Nobel de Literatura es para… Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa: an unclassifiable Nobel winner
Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o should have won the Nobel prize for literature
Mario Vargas Llosa's work and life push boundaries
A Storyteller Enthralled by the Power of Art
Mario, el fuego que nunca se apaga
Waiting for Luggage With Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa surprised and delighted by Nobel prize win
Vargas Llosa wins Nobel literature prize
Vargas Llosa: Nobel Goes for Well-Known Name
Mario Vargas Llosa: Five essential novels
Mario Vargas Llosa, Premio Nobel de Literatura 2010
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel
A look at Mario Vargas Llosa
'Cartographer of Power' Vargas Llosa A Phenomenal Choice for Nobel
Vargas Llosa, l'insoumis

Audio from Mario Vargas Llosa's press conference

Click to hear the New York Times audio clips.

Vargas Llosa says that reading "Tirant lo Blanc" helped him find his calling

"Esta obra me enseñó que el escritor auténtico vuelca en lo que escribe todo lo que hay en él, lo mejor y lo peor"

Click to read the full article

Tirant lo Blanc is an epic romance written by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell, supposedly finished by Martí Joan de Galba and published in Valencia in 1490. It is one of the best known medieval works of literature in Catalan, and played an important role in the evolution of the Western novel because of its influence on the author Miguel de Cervantes.

Man Booker International Prize

Mario Vargas Llosa shortlisted for Man Booker International Prize

The short for this year's Prize has just been announced:

Peter Carey (Australia)
Evan S. Connell (USA)
Mahasweta Devi (India)
E.L. Doctorow (USA)
James Kelman (UK)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Arnost Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
Alice Munro (Canada)
V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Kenya)
Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

The winner will be announced in May.

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Katie Toms reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

In 1950, 15-year-old Ricardo becomes obsessed with an exotic, mysterious girl. Over 40 years he continually chances upon her; each time, she sleeps with him despite having a new husband for each city in which they meet. The only crime of the 'bad' girl in question seems to be that she asks for what she wants when it comes to sex and refuses to say she loves him. Her punishment? Near death and permanent vaginal damage at the hands of her brutal Japanese husband. The final reckoning involves cancer, a double mastectomy and painful death. There are some vivid passages here, but on the whole this novel is a glib, disjointed monologue. Sadistic pornography may prove titillating for some, but it makes for dull reading.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Jason Wilson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

"You turn me into a character in a soap opera," says Ricardo to the bad girl.

But it's the bad girl who is the soap's femme fatale in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel. She first appears in 1950 in the narrator's teens in Miraflores, a smart Lima suburb, during the mambo craze, with her "mischievous laugh and mocking glance". There is no delicate exploration of character, just that laugh, that glance and an unfolding chain of erotic encounters, in which she is passive and elusive.

Vargas Llosa's subtly crafted novels divide into deeply serious ones, like the recent The Feast of the Goat, and more light-hearted, teasing ones, sometimes combining both as in his brilliant Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Here, the bad girl tantalises her absurdly loyal romantic lover in different guises. She is Comrade Arlette, guerrilla fighter in Paris and Havana, then Madame Arnoux in Paris, then Mrs Richardson in Newmarket, and Kuriko, shady businessman's moll in Tokyo. We appreciate Vargas Llosa's skill in delaying her dramatic entrances and latest mutation, although she remains the same.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Feast of the Goat

Francisco Goldman reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat.

The Feast of the Goat, nearly documentary in tone, is a dense, dramatic, at times almost unbearably cruel and relentless political novel. It belongs to the illustrious tradition of the Latin American–dictator novel, in this case the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. But it is also a culmination of two searches that have characterized Vargas Llosa's writing since the beginning of his career: for what he has referred to as the "total novel"; and also for a Flaubertian perfection, a perfect fusion of style, form, and subject. A few years ago, in an essay on Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Vargas Llosa reflected on this idea of a "total" novel: "This is a desire to extend itself, to grow and multiply through descriptions, characters and incidents in order to exhaust all the possibilities, to represent its world on the largest, and also the most minute scale, at all levels and from all angles." Among the great works he lists that have achieved this is, of course, Madame Bovary. The "total" and Flaubertian idea, the "utopian design," is to create a novelistic reality so autonomous and whole that the reader feels convinced that this illusory reality is as true and durable as the reality it purports to describe, perhaps even more so.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

David Robson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The title is promising. Who wants to read about good girls? But then the doubts set in. Will one bad girl be enough? The trouble with bad girls in literature is that they have shot their bolt after a couple of bedroom scenes. Only the best of them - the ones who are good girls underneath - can sustain a whole novel.

The Peruvian veteran Mario Vargas Llosa has found an ingenious solution to an old problem. He uses a single bad girl, but to keep the character fresh, re-introduces her in a series of different guises.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Miranda France reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

He means "bad" in the good sense, of course - at least at the beginning. It is the summer of 1950, a time our narrator, Ricardo, will remember as the happiest of his life. Living in Miraflores, a smart neighbourhood of Lima, he and other teenagers enjoy a lively social life, discreetly presided over by priests and maiden aunts.

Their life is a round of making out and breaking up at parties. This is also the historic moment when "everyone stopped dancing waltzes, corridos, blues, boleros, and huarachas because the mambo had demolished them".

Into the midst of such innocent fun strolls Lily, a sophisticated Chilean of 15 who has a scandalous way with her hips when dancing and tells jokes so risqué they make the Miraflores girls blush. "What a girl!" chides Ricardo's aunt.

Ricardo is smitten and dreams of a future in which he can marry Lily and move to Paris. Then, at one of the parties, his paramour is dramatically unmasked: it turns out that Lily is not Chilean and may even be lower-class.

This is when we learn that, quite apart from her provocations on the dance floor, Lily can be "bad" in other ways too. She tells dreadful lies - the kind that make you gasp and stretch your eyes - and she is always pretending to be something she is not. Since he never learns her true name, Ricardo calls her the "bad girl".

The next time they meet, Ricardo is working as a Unesco translator in Paris and Lily has metamorphosed into Comrade Arlette, a revolutionary in training. Later she will be the wife of a diplomat, then of a businessman with an interest in racehorses, then she becomes a kind of geisha, trafficking aphrodisiac remedies for a Japanese honcho.

In each incarnation she crosses paths with Ricardo, whose life is a picture of stability by comparison, except that he cannot form relationships, because he is doomed to love only the Bad Girl. And this he does with passion, in spite of her coldness in bed.

"She allowed herself to be kissed from head to toe, maintaining her usual passivity, and she heard, like someone listening to the rain, Neruda's 'Material nupcial', which I recited into her ear, along with my stammered words of love: this was the happiest night of my life."

Mario Vargas Llosa has a deserved reputation as the intellectual powerhouse of Latin American literature, but I prefer him when he is funny. There is more flesh on the bones of his comic creations.

That is not to say that this is a simple comedy: Ricardo's infatuation is alarming, and there is tragedy in the Bad Girl's cruelty and self-abuse, and in her assertion that money represents "the only happiness you can touch".

The novel contains serious criticisms of Peru's treatment of its poorer citizens. It is also a clever homage to Flaubert, of whom Vargas Llosa has often written admiringly.

All the same, there is a wonderful bolero cheesiness about some of the scenes, especially as Ricardo learns about each new identity of his lover in increasingly outlandish ways.

On one occasion he spots her in a photograph of racegoers at his friend's apartment. On another, a mute neighbour informs him she has telephoned him via a scribbled note on the slate hanging round his neck. If this were going to be a film, you'd definitely want Peter Sellers in it.

The same humour and good naturedness that characterised Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter are written into almost every line of this novel (I think you have to be good natured to describe Newmarket as "mysterious"). Edith Grossman's translation conveys Vargas Llosa's tone marvellously well.

I have some reservations. The Bad Girl's stated ambition - to be "your lapdog, your whore" - strays uncomfortably into male fantasy, as does the retribution visited on her. But that is the story Vargas Llosa wanted to tell, and he does it brilliantly.

I put the light out at midnight with 30 pages still to go. Two hours later I had to put it back on, to find out what happened to the Bad Girl.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

James Lasdun reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

Reading a so-so novel by a first-rate author can be a disconcerting experience. Along with the letdown of the book itself, there's the constant muffled sense of a large talent trying to find a way into its own material. Mario Vargas Llosa's immense resources as a novelist are energetically applied to the surface of this tale of obsessive love - quick scene changes from one cosmopolitan location to another, lightning sketches of Peruvian political history, a bustling cast of eccentrics and revolutionaries, literary allusions galore - but the love story itself never develops a convincing heartbeat.
In the summer of 1950 a 15-year-old Peruvian boy, Ricardo Somocurcio, meets Lily, a dazzling newcomer in the Miraflores district of Lima, claiming to be a Chilean. She turns out to be lying about both her name and her nationality, but by the time Ricardo discovers this he has already fallen under the spell of her "mischievous laugh" and the "mocking glance of her eyes the colour of dark honey." In Paris, a decade later, where Ricardo has gone to work as an interpreter, the girl resurfaces, this time under the equally bogus sobriquet of "Comrade Arlette", on her way to Cuba as a trainee revolutionary. Ricardo's feelings for her return unabated: "the mischievousness I remembered so well still poured out of her, something bold, spontaneous, provocative . . . And she had that dark honey in her eyes." This time the two have an affair, in which Ricardo puts his tender heart on his sleeve, while the "bad girl" keeps hers firmly in the freezer, thereby maintaining control of the relationship.

So begins the infatuation that will become the source of all pain and pleasure in Ricardo's otherwise unremarkable life, for the next 40-odd years. Back in Paris after her Cuban interlude, Comrade Arlette reappears as Mme Robert Arnoux, the expensively dressed wife of a diplomat. Her face, "where mischief was always mixed with curiosity and coquetry", works its familiar magic on Ricardo (her little "pissant" as she now teasingly calls him), and the two resume their affair until she disappears again, breaking his heart and emptying her husband's Swiss bank account.

Her career as a gold-digging femme fatale thus launched, and her pattern of devastating recurrence in Ricardo's life established, it becomes a foregone conclusion that when Ricardo starts visiting England during the mid-60s, she will cross his path again. She does: this time as Mrs Richardson, wife of a wealthy, horse-breeding toff in Newmarket. The "gestures, looks and expressions that were a consummate display of coquetry" have their predictable effect, as they do again a few years later in Tokyo after she trades up once more, this time becoming "Kuriko", mistress to a sadistic Japanese gangster. So it continues: another round in Paris after she returns from Japan, brutalised by her gangster's nasty sex-games but soon recovering "the old vivacity and mischief" under Ricardo's dependable ministrations; then further rounds in Madrid, the south of France . . .

As the above quotations suggest, there's something static about the presentation of the central relation ship. Where you might hope for a deepening sense of its inner reality to emerge with each re-encounter - a tightening scrutiny of what it is that binds these lovers together - you get incantatory repetition instead: "mischief", "coquetry", "dark honey". In place of psychology or even pathology you get biological depictions of the changing state of Otilia's (as her real name turns out to be) vagina and breasts that come across merely as salacious. The faux-clinical tone is something like that of the doctor who discusses with Ricardo the sexual injuries from Otilia's Sadean interlude: "I have no choice but to give you the unpleasant details . . ."

At one point, as if aware of something missing in the substantiation of his heroine's allegedly irresistible charm, Vargas Llosa comes up with a Vietnamese orphan, unable to talk since his traumatic childhood. The mute boy meets the bad girl and lo, he speaks. It is a moment of unforgivable schmaltz that merely makes Otilia seem more improbable than ever.

The name "Mme Arnoux", Otilia's third alias, is also that of the object of Frederic Moreau's infatuation in Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Vargas Llosa has written extensively of his love of Flaubert, and The Bad Girl is in part an homage to Sentimental Education. Some elements, such as the tenuously incorporated running commentary on Peruvian politics, really only make sense if understood as allusions to the original - in this case the backdrop of French political turmoil. Stylistically, however, the book couldn't be less like Flaubert, whose injunctions against cliche, generic description, idees recues, it flouts with apparent glee, tossing out such lines as "He was the incarnation of the careless, absent-minded intellectual" by way of characterisation, and off-the-peg accessories (high-end, of course) - Guerlain toothbrush, Vuitton dressing case - by way of furnishings.

In its better moments (and there are some incidentally lively passages) it seems to aspire to something more like the skimming swiftness of Flaubert's pupil Maupassant, whose raffishly cynical study of corrupted desire, Bel Ami, it occasionally resembles. But whereas Maupassant situates his predatory charmers in a Paris brought to life by incandescently imagined detail, Vargas Llosa (who has achieved equally brilliant results in other novels, such as The Feast of the Goat) too often settles for the kind of obvious local colour you could find in a tourist brochure. The depiction of Swinging London is particularly lame, beginning with this painfully clunky overview: "Music replaced books and ideas as a centre of attraction for the young, above all with the Beatles but also including Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger, other English bands and singers, and hippies and the psychedelic revolution of the flower children."

The line about the Stones - "with Mick Jagger" - is so richly ludicrous, I wondered if there was some weird pastiche afoot; an attempt to deliver modern times in a deliberately stilted, anachronistic manner so as to simulate the weatherbeaten patina of a "classic". I don't think so, but perhaps in 100 years or so, when the 20th century seems as quaintly old-world as the 19th, The Bad Girl 's kitschy aura will have become imperceptible and readers will share the sentiments of one of the characters in its pages who, on hearing Ricardo tell his tale, is made to exclaim obligingly: "Do you know, it's a marvellous love story?" For now, though, that reads more like wishful thinking.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Peter Kemp reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The Bad Girl opens with an exhilarating surge of energy. It is 1950, and in Mira-flores, an attractive seaside suburb of the Peruvian capital, Lima, 15-year-old Ricardo Somocurcio is having the summer of his life. Amid the frangipani, jacaranda and jasmine of the neighbourhood’s lush gardens, he and his friends flirt and fall in love for the first time. As gorgeous days expire in flaming sunsets, dance parties are held, where the mambo, the craze of the moment, holds sway. Relishing every remembered detail of the place and period, Mario Vargas Llosa beguilingly resurrects a sensuous paradise, into which erupts Lily, an exotic-seeming girl with an enticingly foreign Chilean accent. Provocative and flamboyant (but evasive about her background), she soon has Ricardo slavishly devoted to her until, dramatically exposed as not what she seems, she abruptly disappears.

Fast forward 10 years and Ricardo is in Paris training to be a translator. Among South American expatriates there plotting to carry the success of Castro’s Cuban revolution into their own countries, he is surprised to reencounter Lily, now calling herself Comrade Arlette. Rapidly she reasserts her “bad girl” spell over him (this time letting him take her to bed, where she is acquiescent but unresponsive), then again abruptly departs. From Havana, reports arrive that she is having a passionate affair with a revolutionary commandante. Then, in yet another of her startling metamorphoses, she reappears in Paris as Madame Arnoux, the chic, impeccably correct wife of a high-level functionary at the Quai d’Orsay, only to vanish again in murky circumstances.

For the rest of the novel, this pattern recurs with ever greater implausibility. As the decades pass, Ricardo drifts from Paris to London and on to Tokyo and Madrid, only to keep meeting “the bad girl” in some fresh guise: from Mrs Richardson, the wife of a crooked English entrepreneur, to Kuriko, the masochistic mistress of a thuggishly perverted Japanese gangster. Predictably unpredictable, she repeatedly reenchants Ricardo, then departs with mysterious suddenness.

“There was something in her impossible not to admire,” Ricardo asserts of his femme fatale. If so, it stays well hidden in these pages. Compulsively drawn away from him to the moneyed and powerful, she strikes the reader as a monster of grabby materialism, lying, stealing and betraying lovers and friends. Her impoverished origins, it’s unconvincingly intimated, go some way to justifying all this. And her decline, almost farcically melodramatic, into a mutilated travesty of her former siren self looks designed to invest her with closing pathos. But since Vargas Llosa never manages to make her remotely plausible either as a person or a symbol, none of this has any purchase.

Allusions to Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (which features a weak-willed romantic smitten with another Madame Arnoux) suggest that Vargas Llosa regards himself as offering a similar panorama of misplaced attachment and dashed hopes, personal and political. But his chroniclings of social change can be embarrassingly jejune. In Swinging London, Ricardo solemnly explains, “Music replaced books and ideas as a centre of attraction for the young, above all with the Beatles but also including Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger, other English bands and singers, and hippies and the psychedelic revolution of the flower children.”

Political commentary has a matching banality that it’s hard to credit as coming from the author of such masterly Conradian novels as Death in the Andes (1996), his epic survey of the terrorised Peru of the 1980s, and The Feast of the Goat (2002), his riveting portrayal of the ghoulish tyranny of General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.

Awkwardly pitched somewhere between realism and magic realism, The Bad Girl keeps stressing how enigmatic its heroine is. But the real puzzle it poses is why Vargas Llosa should have misapplied his talents to this feeble fabrication that, getting underway with colourful buoyancy, fizzles out so thoroughly that reading it is like watching a balloon deflate.

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Peruvian Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

Lucinda Byatt reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

Peru's leading contemporary writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, needs little introduction after rising to fame in the boom years of Latin American literature. This latest work combines his political and literary passions, expressed as always with wit and irony, but without the grand scope of his "total novels". The Bad Girl is primarily an analysis of love in which Vargas Llosa questions the nature of unrequited love and abject devotion expressed in "cheap, sentimental" language.

Vargas Llosa narrates the story through Ricardo, a teenager from the rich suburb of Miraflores in Lima, whose romance with Lily throbbed to the explosion of mambo in the summer of 1950. The evocation of Lima at the time is hauntingly nostalgic. Lily's unmasking and disappearance follow in rapid succession, yet the "bad girl" has left her mark. After moving to Paris, the haunt of other exiled "writers who didn't write, artists who didn't paint", and qualifying as a Unesco translator, Ricardo again meets Lily, now a trainee guerrilla fighter, Comrade Arlette.

But after using him for her own ends, she again disappears. As the pattern repeats itself, the predictability of each parting and "surprise" reunion becomes rather tedious. Indeed, Ricardo wonders if, after 30 years of suffering, this farce could still be called a l
ove story?

Ricardo's work as a translator also provides Vargas Llosa with a wonderful pretext to explore that "profession of phantoms", scathingly described by a colleague as a "disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between".

Taken solely at face value, the main characters remain unconvincingly monochromatic – Ricardo the unambitious drudge who drowns his misery in work, and the "bad girl" a scheming liar whose pursuit of material wealth overrides any compunction for having deserted her family and ruined countless other lives.

But the novel remains intriguing and poignant, sustained by historical evocations of the Fifties and Sixties, the violent years of the Shining Path, and the author's own unsuccessful political foray into Peruvian politics.

Above all, it pays homage to the Vargas Llosa's literary heroes, their sentiments and the redeeming power of love.

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Peruvian Literature

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

Chris Barsanti reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

If it weren’t for unrequited love, our literature and film would be in sorry shape. As a clear representation of how deeply buried in our psyches this trauma is, we have seen it reflected back to us time and again: the moon-eyed lover sighing into the wind as his/her beloved walks past, blissfully unaware of the wonderful torment they are inspiring simply by existing. Often these things work themselves out in the end, the distant object of affection is suddenly made to realize how perfect their admirer is for them, and so into the happily ever after they go. Or, the other common resolution is that the admirer is made to realize that it is not the uncaring, gorgeous target of all their woo-pitching whom they should be with, but instead the good friend who has stood by them throughout their torture (normally more homely in appearance, but sharper of mind and generally seen as a better match overall).

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Peruvian Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa

Best books of 2007

The Washington Post's best books of 2007 list includes seven Spanish and Latin American authors.

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (FSG). Irresistibly entertaining and, like all of its author's work, formidably smart. - Jonathan Yardley

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot DIaz (Riverhead). Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a hero in the classical sense. Geek swagger, baby. Get used to it. - Jabari Asim

Delirium, by Laura Restrepo; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Nan A. Talese). A book-and-a-half: stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing. The setting is Bogota, Colombia. Far above politics, right up into high art. - Carolyn See

In Her Absence, by Antonio Munoz Molina; translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other). This elegant, precise and inimitable novel focuses intensely on a civil servant and his passionate yet painful relationship with his wife of six years. - Brigitte Weeks

Nada, by Carmen Laforet; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Modern Library). After six decades, it has lost none of its power and originality, and we are fortunate to have it in this fine translation. - JY

Dancing to "Almendra", by Mayra Montero; translated by Edith Grossman (FSG). The fictional, gossamer beauty and blood-soaked brutality that personifies Cuba of 1957. - Joanne Omang

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins). Readers will recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Peru. A fable for the entire continent. - Jonathan Yardley

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Latin American Literature

100 Notable Books of 2007

This year's New York Times' 100 Notable Books includes 5 Latin American Books, and Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives made it to The 10 Best Books of 2007 list.

THE BAD GIRL. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.

DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

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Latin American Literature

The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Heller McAlpin reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

Mario Vargas Llosa's wonderful new novel, "The Bad Girl," is about one man's persistent desire for a difficult woman. It is also, cunningly, about a broader persistence of hope for a better world. On one level a deliciously absorbing love story that details the eponymous bad girl's damaging lifelong hold on his narrator, Vargas Llosa's novel spans decades and continents - and, in the process, with a deftness that borders on literary sleight of hand, bridges the personal and the universal.

Although less overtly political than such earlier novels as "Death in the Andes" and "The Feast of the Goat," Vargas Llosa sets his thwarted love story against a backdrop of social turmoil, revolutions and the recurrent heartbreak of failed democracy in his native Peru. "The Bad Girl" spans 1950s Lima, 1960s revolutionary Paris, 1970s hippie London, 1980s swinging Tokyo and 1990s theatrical Spain. Vargas Llosa's novel is more similar in tone to his 1977 dazzler, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," than to his last, quasi-historical novel, "The Way to Paradise" (2003), about Paul Gauguin and his socialist grandmother. Each of its seven long chapters, separated by years, relates a new episode in the lurching, on-again-off-again saga of Ricardo Somocurcio and the bad girl, who sports a new identity each time he encounters her.

Ricardo is an unusually sympathetic narrator - modest, bookish, utterly trustworthy. Orphaned at 10 and raised by a loving aunt in Miraflores, he has fixed on a simple ambition by the time he first meets the love of his life the summer he turns 15: to live in Paris. Posing as Lily, a Chilean newcomer to the neighborhood, the bad girl is flamboyant and gorgeous, "the incarnation of coquettishness." Ricardo writes, "I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way to fall in love - it was also called heating up to a hundred degrees - and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times." In what is to become a lifelong pattern, Lily leads him on before rebuffing him - and then vanishes.

When she turns up again in Paris more than a decade later, it's as Comrade Arlette, an activist en route to Cuba for guerrilla training. Ricardo, meanwhile, is training as a simultaneous interpreter. She pretends they never met, then, with an insult, concedes that they have - "Even back then you had a sanctimonious look" - yet denies being Lily the Chilean girl. She accepts his advances passively, unresponsively, and keeps him dangling: "Never lose hope, good boy."

Comrade Arlette's political apathy is as obvious as her sexual indifference. Her outspoken credo is "to get what you want, anything goes." When she allows Ricardo to make love to her, it's clear that she's using him as a possible ticket to stay in Paris.

Three years later, she turns up as the elegant Mme. Robert Arnoux at UNESCO, where her husband is a diplomat and Ricardo works as a translator.

And so it goes. They resume their affair, abuse included. She's both a liar and brutally honest. "How naive you are, what a dreamer," she scolds when Ricardo asks her to marry him. "You don't know me. I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you'll never be, unfortunately."

Ricardo is repeatedly taken in and left "a human wreck." He swears it's the last time when he falls into a trap arranged to excite the bad girl's creepy, voyeuristic Japanese lover, yet a few years later he goes into debt to finance her medical care. He retreats between episodes to a "fairly normal, though empty ... dull, flat life," throwing himself into the self-effacing interpreting business at international conferences and berating himself as a "failure ... imbecile."

This works, without trying our patience, because Vargas Llosa succeeds not only in conveying the bad girl's attraction but also in pulling us into Ricardo's cycle of hopefulness, eager to learn what will happen next between them. Is it love, masochism, fate or compulsion that keeps him coming back for more? Whatever it is, most of us have been there at one time or another.

Ricardo's friendships with doomed individuals - a revolutionary in Paris, a hippie artist in London, a fellow translator in Japan - and his unexpected but satisfying discovery of la niña mala's true identity further heighten the novel's considerable allure. (One wishes translator Edith Grossman had left a "niña mala" or two in Spanish for flavor.)

Most impressively, by mirroring Ricardo and the bad girl's tug-of-war with the tug-of-war between democracy and totalitarianism that concurrently roils the world, and especially their native Peru, Vargas Llosa's novel becomes an allegory for the undauntable desire not just for love but also for freedom. Over and over again, the world dashes our hopes just as the bad girl disappoints Vargas Llosa's narrator - and yet we love it and keep hoping for the best anyway.

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The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Heller McAlpin reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Bad Girl.

Mario Vargas Llosa's wonderful new novel, "The Bad Girl," is about one man's persistent desire for a difficult woman. It is also, cunningly, about a broader persistence of hope for a better world. On one level a deliciously absorbing love story that details the eponymous bad girl's damaging lifelong hold on his narrator, Vargas Llosa's novel spans decades and continents - and, in the process, with a deftness that borders on literary sleight of hand, bridges the personal and the universal.

Although less overtly political than such earlier novels as "Death in the Andes" and "The Feast of the Goat," Vargas Llosa sets his thwarted love story against a backdrop of social turmoil, revolutions and the recurrent heartbreak of failed democracy in his native Peru. "The Bad Girl" spans 1950s Lima, 1960s revolutionary Paris, 1970s hippie London, 1980s swinging Tokyo and 1990s theatrical Spain. Vargas Llosa's novel is more similar in tone to his 1977 dazzler, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," than to his last, quasi-historical novel, "The Way to Paradise" (2003), about Paul Gauguin and his socialist grandmother. Each of its seven long chapters, separated by years, relates a new episode in the lurching, on-again-off-again saga of Ricardo Somocurcio and the bad girl, who sports a new identity each time he encounters her.

Ricardo is an unusually sympathetic narrator - modest, bookish, utterly trustworthy. Orphaned at 10 and raised by a loving aunt in Miraflores, he has fixed on a simple ambition by the time he first meets the love of his life the summer he turns 15: to live in Paris. Posing as Lily, a Chilean newcomer to the neighborhood, the bad girl is flamboyant and gorgeous, "the incarnation of coquettishness." Ricardo writes, "I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way to fall in love - it was also called heating up to a hundred degrees - and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times." In what is to become a lifelong pattern, Lily leads him on before rebuffing him - and then vanishes.

When she turns up again in Paris more than a decade later, it's as Comrade Arlette, an activist en route to Cuba for guerrilla training. Ricardo, meanwhile, is training as a simultaneous interpreter. She pretends they never met, then, with an insult, concedes that they have - "Even back then you had a sanctimonious look" - yet denies being Lily the Chilean girl. She accepts his advances passively, unresponsively, and keeps him dangling: "Never lose hope, good boy."

Comrade Arlette's political apathy is as obvious as her sexual indifference. Her outspoken credo is "to get what you want, anything goes." When she allows Ricardo to make love to her, it's clear that she's using him as a possible ticket to stay in Paris.

Three years later, she turns up as the elegant Mme. Robert Arnoux at UNESCO, where her husband is a diplomat and Ricardo works as a translator.

And so it goes. They resume their affair, abuse included. She's both a liar and brutally honest. "How naive you are, what a dreamer," she scolds when Ricardo asks her to marry him. "You don't know me. I'd only stay forever with a man who was very, very rich and powerful, which you'll never be, unfortunately."

Ricardo is repeatedly taken in and left "a human wreck." He swears it's the last time when he falls into a trap arranged to excite the bad girl's creepy, voyeuristic Japanese lover, yet a few years later he goes into debt to finance her medical care. He retreats between episodes to a "fairly normal, though empty ... dull, flat life," throwing himself into the self-effacing interpreting business at international conferences and berating himself as a "failure ... imbecile."

This works, without trying our patience, because Vargas Llosa succeeds not only in conveying the bad girl's attraction but also in pulling us into Ricardo's cycle of hopefulness, eager to learn what will happen next between them. Is it love, masochism, fate or compulsion that keeps him coming back for more? Whatever it is, most of us have been there at one time or another.

Ricardo's friendships with doomed individuals - a revolutionary in Paris, a hippie artist in London, a fellow translator in Japan - and his unexpected but satisfying discovery of la niña mala's true identity further heighten the novel's considerable allure. (One wishes translator Edith Grossman had left a "niña mala" or two in Spanish for flavor.)

Most impressively, by mirroring Ricardo and the bad girl's tug-of-war with the tug-of-war between democracy and totalitarianism that concurrently roils the world, and especially their native Peru, Vargas Llosa's novel becomes an allegory for the undauntable desire not just for love but also for freedom. Over and over again, the world dashes our hopes just as the bad girl disappoints Vargas Llosa's narrator - and yet we love it and keep hoping for the best anyway.

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The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Chloë Schama reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl".

Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel, "The Bad Girl" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 276 pages, $25) is a joyful romp through a torturous relationship. The novel traces the obsession of its narrator, Ricardo Somocurcio, from the inception of the affair in Peru to its last spasm in Spain, alighting in a Paris roiling with student ferment, a London filled with peace-loving hippies, and a sterile Tokyo flashing with neon.

Various incarnations of the bad girl of the title surface in all these places. She first appears as Lily, a 14-year-old girl who sinks her talons into the youthful narrator's heart while they roam the streets and cafes of Miraflores in Peru, and her grip lasts the entirety of her life. "Lily" reappears 10 years after their first meeting as "Comrade Arlette," the recipient of a scholarship to train for Castro's forces. Her ambition, however, is anything but revolutionary, and the scholarship is merely a means to escape the poverty of her upbringing. Just before she is scheduled to depart the training ground of Paris for Cuba she offers Ricardo an alternative: If he can get her out of her obligations, she will stay with him in Paris. Ricardo punts, unwilling to endanger his friend (a more active revolutionary) who has arranged the scholarship, and assures her that he will wait in Paris while she fulfills the conditions of her contract. The bad girl slips away and begins the elusive life that will bring her in and out of contact with the narrator for the rest of the novel.

She returns to Paris as "Madame Arnoux," the wife of a high-ranking Unesco official, absconds with Monsieur Arnoux's paltry fortune, and finally resurfaces in the country town of Newmarket outside London; now she is "Mrs. Richardson," the wife of a stuffy horse breeder. In a later life, she becomes "Kuriko," the mistress and employee of a shady Japanese businessman or gangster. Time after time, the narrator runs to the bad girl's side when she needs his attention and assistance, ready with declarations of his love, to which she responds with snide deprecations. His sentimental education is brutal and the lesson should be obvious, and yet he's incapable of changing his adulatory, punch-drunk response to her whims and fancies. How could he? The thing that pains him the most also brings him the greatest pleasure.

Allusions to Flaubert's "Sentimental Education" run throughout Mr. Vargas Llosa's novel. Madame Arnoux, of course, is the object of Frédéric Moreau's devotion and the narrator reads Flaubert's novels from time to time. But "The Bad Girl" is influenced by Flaubert beyond its offhand references. In an encomium to Flaubert, "Flaubert, our Contemporary," Mr. Vargas Llosa commends Flaubert for making his narrators "ghostly figures" — beings who "enjoy no special privileges of omniscience or ubiquity." Ricardo Somocurcio is a dramatic extension of this quality which, Mr. Vargas Llosa believes, has been one of the defining elements of modern literature. Ricardo makes his living as a translator and interpreter — "the professions of phantoms," as his colleague phrases it — voicing other people's opinions and thoughts before his own. His sole aspiration is to "die of old age in Paris" and, as he spends more and more time away from Peru, he gradually loses any sense of a national identity. No longer a true citizen of Peru, he is aware that he will also "never be integrated into the country where we had chosen to live."

In Flaubert's novels, Mr. Vargas Llosa writes, the spectral narrator allowed Flaubert to create a fictional reality that was undisturbed by an omniscient, judgmental, and external observer. It didn't have to be an entirely believable reality, just cohesive. Flaubert's great gift to modern novelists, according to Mr. Vargas Llosa, was to inform them that "between real reality and fictional reality there is no possible identification, but rather an unbridgeable distance." The fictional world of "The Bad Girl" is a world distant from the wars and poverty of "real" reality. Mr. Vargas Llosa doesn't ignore these things, but they take place on the periphery. What remains at the center, and what unifies the novel, is melodrama.

His characters — from Fukuda, the evil Japanese gangster, to Mrs. Stubard, the English guardian angel — are almost Dickensian in their dimensions, unabashed stereotypes of their native lands. The love affair is painful, perverse, and perpetual, relying entirely on unlikely coincidences. The sun always sets at the right moment; the waves always break dramatically. Small apartments in back alleys are horrifically squalid; large apartments on grand boulevards are lavishly sumptuous. These a aesthetic elements are not out of place; they fit within Mr. Vargas Llosa's world where polar emotions — extreme pain and extreme pleasure — are inextricably entwined. In a certain reality, this entangled dynamic would lead to sorrow, but in this novel the excess is entertaining. "The Bad Girl" is not without its quiet, more subdued moments but, for the most part, raucous sadomasochism has never been so much fun.

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The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Kathryn Harrison reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him. Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

The genius of “Madame Bovary,” as Vargas Llosa describes it in “The Perpetual Orgy,” is the “descriptive frenzy … the narrator uses to destroy reality and recreate it as a different reality.” In other words, Flaubert was a master of realism not because he reproduced the world around him, but because he used language to create an alternate existence, a distillate whose emotional gravity transcends that of life itself. Emma, Vargas Llosa reminds us, has survived countless readers. Not merely immortal but undiminished by time, her passions remain as keen as the day her ink was wet.

Vargas Llosa, too, is a master. Long one of the pre-eminent voices of postmodernism, he has transformed a revolutionary work of Western literature into a vibrant, contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s — and ’70s and ’80s — just as “Madame Bovary” did the provincial life of the 1830s. In each case, the author revisits the time and geography of his own youth in a work poised, minutely balanced, between the psychic and corporeal lives of its characters. The trajectory of Emma’s yearning leads inexorably to her poisoning herself with arsenic, the torturous death of a woman who seizes freedoms allowed only to men. And if contemporary society appears less inclined to penalize a sexually liberated woman than did the rigidly censorious era of Emma Bovary, Vargas Llosa evinces a more dangerous postfeminist world, one in which misogyny flourishes under a veneer of progressive attitudes and token equalities.

“The Bad Girl” begins, like “Madame Bovary,” with boyhood scenes narrated in the first person, an “I” who becomes for a time “we,” echoing Flaubert’s chorus of schoolmates. But while Flaubert shifts into an exalted omniscience, Vargas Llosa allows the “good boy,” Ricardo, to claim his novel’s voice, recounting an erotic fixation that begins in 1950, in the Mira flores district of Lima, Peru, when Ricardo is just 15 and a new girl arrives in town. She calls herself Lily and, in clothes that cling “perversely,” dances the mambo like a “demonic whirlwind,” pulling Ricardo into her orbit, awakening his lust and enslaving him to the idea that she alone can answer his desire. Permanently intoxicated, Ricardo will recognize Lily’s essence no matter how she disguises herself, no matter how many years pass between their assignations, reunions whose power to devastate Ricardo drives him to the point of suicide, and which she dismisses as bland interludes between more compelling love affairs.

Blessed with an ability to enjoy simple pleasures, Ricardo achieves his life’s dream by the age of 25: he lives in Paris, where he makes a modest living as an interpreter for Unesco. The bad girl, his one complicated pleasure, with the capacity to ruin all the rest, seems securely fixed in his past, a peculiarly intense first crush, until she reappears. No longer a memory but a riveting presence, Lily, now “Comrade Arlette,” poses as a would-be revolutionary, “bold, spontaneous, provocative,” passing through the City of Light en route to Cuba for guerrilla training — arguably wasted on a woman to whom sneak attacks seem second nature.

Six months later, having seduced “one of the historic commandantes” of the Cuban revolution, the bad girl has embarked on a career of increasingly daring affairs. Ricardo, she makes clear, is unworthy of what little attention she gives him. Treating him as a plaything, she ignores the depth of his feelings and teases him sexually even as she leaves him, for a month, a year, three years: he never knows how long his loneliness will last. At the end of one such tryst, she waves goodbye with a “flowered parasol,” summoning the one “of rosy iridescent silk” Emma carries while seducing Charles Bovary. There are enough such alignments to amuse ardent admirers of the older novel, but it’s possible they won’t catch them. So complete and convincing is the spell cast by “The Bad Girl” that it doesn’t allow a reader’s attention to stray.

Ricardo’s work as an interpreter affords him ample opportunity to travel and reconnect with his jet-setting, selfreinventing love, who attaches herself like a succubus to one rich paramour after another, in one locale after another. Less welcome is the anxiety his job inspires about his identity. Paris of the 1960s, the culture in which Vargas Llosa came of intellectual age, witnessed the popularization of existential philosophy, and Ricardo judges himself not only deracinated, a perpetual foreigner, but also lacking in substance. He’s trapped in the moment of translating one person’s language into another’s, “of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”

But what is identity? The bad girl sheds one mask only to try on the next. Driven by a need for excitement and riches only the most powerful and dangerous men can offer, she assumes whatever appearance might secure what she craves. Is her true self hidden from view, or does it, like the good boy’s, not really exist? Does only desire have the power to define us , Ricardo shaped by his love for the bad girl, who is herself the reflection of what she pursues? The reader knows that Ricardo and the girl who began as Lily will cross paths indefinitely, that she will allow him to possess her only long enough to rekindle his obsession, and that despite his intention to give her up for the toxic addiction she is, he will take her back the next time. Still, the novel possesses an intensifying, at points almost exhausting suspense, like that of a car being driven recklessly around hairpin turns, each more perilous than the one preceding. The bad girl demands attention from lovers and readers alike. Is she wicked, or admirable, or both? Where will she be the next time the good boy encounters her? What will she call herself? How long can he endure? Will she ever return his affection in kind?

“It is because she feels that society is fettering her imagination, her body, her dreams, her appetites,” Vargas Llosa writes in “The Perpetual Orgy,” “that Emma suffers, commits adultery, lies, steals, and in the end kills herself.” Vargas Llosa’s bad girl suffers, too, even as she makes those around her suffer. Though she tries to temper her restlessness and limit her aspirations, she cannot reconcile herself to the suffocation of petit- bourgeois existence any more than Emma can. “A man is free, at least,” Emma observes, praying the child she carries is a son, “free to range, … to surmount obstacles, to taste the rarest pleasures. Whereas a woman is continually thwarted.”

The heroism of both women is that they refuse to be diminished by modest, reasonable hopes or by respectable society. Creatures of appetite — for sex, money, excitement, life — bad girls serve their hunger first, and last. They are terrible and they are enviable, because they won’t settle for less than everything they want. Because, in the end, they accept not only their essential nature, but also the consequences of their choice to fulfill rather than deny it.

Source: NY Times





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The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Jonathan Yardley reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The Bad Girl will do nothing to improve his lot in Stockholm, but somehow it seems unlikely that this much worries Vargas Llosa. Obviously, the novel was written for the sheer fun of it -- the fun for Vargas Llosa in writing it, the fun for us in reading it. It also obviously was written out of a deep nostalgia for the author's lost youth and for the Lima in which he then lived. He evokes it beautifully:

"In the early years of the 1950s there were still no tall buildings in Miraflores, a neighborhood of one-story houses -- two at the most -- and gardens with their inevitable geraniums, poincianas, laurels, bougainvilleas, and lawns and verandas along which honeysuckle or ivy climbed, with rocking chairs where neighbors waited for nightfall, gossiping or inhaling the scent of the jasmine. In some parks there were ceibo trees thorny with red and pink flowers, and the straight, clean sidewalks were lined with frangipani, jacaranda, and mulberry trees, a note of color along with the flowers in the gardens and the little D'Onofrio ice-cream trucks . . . that drove up and down the streets day and night, announcing their presence with a Klaxon whose slow ululation had the effect on me of a primitive horn, a prehistoric reminiscence. You could still hear birds singing in that Miraflores, where families cut a pine branch when their girls reached marriageable age because if they didn't, the poor things would become old maids like my aunt Alberta."

Into this paradise, during the "fabulous summer" of 1950, comes a 14- or 15-year-old girl who calls herself Lily and claims to be Chilean. Soon enough she is found out as an impostor and expelled from 15-year-old Ricardo's privileged set, but the damage has been done: He is madly in love with her, and her expulsion is "the beginning of real life for me, the life that separates castles in the air, illusions, and fables from harsh reality." She has rejected his declarations of love, but she scarcely vanishes from his life. By the early 1960s he is in Paris, studying (successfully) to become a translator at UNESCO, when she appears as Comrade Arlette, ostensibly to bring Castroite revolution to Peru. She goes off to Cuba, but soon resurfaces as Madame Robert Arnoux, wife of a French diplomat. Ricardo craves her as ardently as ever, even as she blithely dismisses him: "What cheap, sentimental things you say to me, Ricardito." She does permit him to make love to her but vanishes once more, reappearing as Mrs. Richardson, wife of a wealthy Englishman hooked on "the aristocratic passion par excellence: horses."

By now Ricardo has figured out that she has come a long way: "I tried to picture her childhood, being poor in the hell that Peru is for the poor, and her adolescence, perhaps even worse, the countless difficulties, defeats, sacrifices, concessions she must have suffered in Peru, in Cuba, in order to move ahead and reach the place she was now." He understands that she is now "a grown woman, convinced that life was a jungle where only the worst triumphed, and ready to do anything not to be conquered and to keep moving higher." And yet:

"Everything I told her was true: I was still crazy about her. It was enough for me to see her to realize that, despite my knowing that any relationship with the bad girl was doomed to failure, the only thing I really wanted in life with the passion others bring to the pursuit of fortune, glory, success, power, was having her, with all her lies, entanglements, egotism and disappearances. A cheap, sentimental thing, no doubt, but also true that I wouldn't do anything . . . but curse how slowly the hours went by until I could see her again."

Over and over again she tests him, never more so than in a bedroom in Tokyo, "an experience that had left a wound in my memory." He actually manages to persuade himself for a time that he does not love her, but the obsession is too powerful: "I was a hopeless imbecile to still be in love with a madwoman, an adventurer, an unscrupulous female with whom no man, I least of all, could maintain a stable relationship without eventually being stepped on." In time he tells his story to a friend, a woman, who calls it "a marvelous love story," and who later adds, "What luck that girl has, inspiring love like this." There is a moment when Ricardo wonders, "Could this farce more than thirty years old be called a love story, Ricardito?" but in his heart he knows that's just what it is, and Vargas Llosa tells it as such.

Being Vargas Llosa, he takes care of plenty of other business as well. The novel touches on the full sweep of Peruvian history from the 1950s to the Shining Path terrorism, "which would last throughout the eighties and provoke an unprecedented bloodbath in Peruvian history: more than sixty thousand dead and disappeared." He says a lament for the generation of Peruvians before his own "who, when they reached old age, saw their lifelong dream of Peru making progress fade instead of materialize."

He also, having made Ricardo a translator and interpreter, affords himself the opportunity to have a bit of fun. One interpreter remarks: "Our profession is a disguised form of procuring, pimping, or being a go-between," and when Ricardo himself turns to translation, he discovers that, "As I always suspected, literary translations were very poorly paid, the fees much lower than for commercial ones." Probably no one is more amused by this than the redoubtable Edith Grossman, who has translated The Bad Girl with her accustomed skill and grace, making this lovely novel wholly accessible to American readers.

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