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.

Read More







Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Stephen Finucan reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

For more than 20 years, Arturo Pérez-Reverte made his livelihood in war zones. Working first as a correspondent for the Spanish daily Pueblo, and later as a reporter for Televisión Española, he filed stories from Cyprus, the Falklands, Beirut, El Salvador, Sarajevo – and Eritrea, where for a period of months he was listed as missing and believed killed.

In the 1980s he turned his pen to fiction, and by the mid-'90s, with a burgeoning reputation as the thinking person's thriller writer and a trio of bestsellers under his belt – The Fencing Master, The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas – he gave up journalism and began writing full time. He solidified his popularity with the Capitán Alatriste series, tales of a swashbuckling mercenary that fed its author's passion for genre and history, specifically that of Spain's "golden century."

With The Painter of Battles, however, Pérez-Reverte returns to a more recent past, namely the two decades he spent chronicling the horrors of modern warfare.

In the novel, Andrés Faulques, a retired combat photographer, serves as Pérez-Reverte's stand-in. Secluded in a medieval watchtower that overlooks the Mediterranean, Faulques busies himself painting a mural on the tower walls that strives to depict the history of war. His solitude is broken by a young Croatian, Ivo Markovic, the subject of one of Faulques' most famous pictures: a photograph of Croat soldiers retreating from the Serbian onslaught at Vukovar. It's an image that graced the covers of newspapers and magazines worldwide, a photo that Faulques "never failed to take pleasure from."

But it is also a picture that cost Markovic dearly. His face, with its "bright, extremely vacant eyes, features distorted by weariness, skin covered with drops of the same sweat that plastered his dirty, tangled hair to his forehead," was recognized by his Serbian neighbours, who took retribution by raping and murdering his wife and child.

Now Markovic has come for his own vengeance. But before he can take his satisfaction, he needs Faulques to grasp something about himself. "I need for us to talk first," he tells the photographer. "I need to know you better, to be sure that you realize certain things. I want you to learn and understand ... After that, I'll be able to kill you."

What follows is a harrowing meditation not only on the nature of war, but also the nature of humankind.

Markovic's visits to the watchtower stir memories for Faulques, memories of, among other things, the execution of Druse militiamen in Lebanon, the shooting of a looter on the street in Mogadishu, and of wounded Chadian rebels being bound and left on the banks of the Chari river as food for the crocodiles. There are also memories of a former lover, Olvido Ferrara. Faulques may have to answer for as much for her death on the Borovo Naselje road near Vukovar as he does the death of Markovic's family.

For both men, it is the mural that becomes their channel. For Faulques, it has "little to do with his artistic ability and much to do with his memory." His style is stolen from others, from Uccello and Brueghal, Bosch and Goya, because the "old masters, more than anyone, knew how to make the invisible visible." And it is the invisible – the impulse behind the action, the incitement behind the brutality – that Faulques is trying to capture with his brush strokes.

For Markovic, the mural is his key to understanding Faulques, and in doing so, perhaps finding the logic to his own suffering.

The many fans of Pérez-Reverte will find The Painter of Battles a departure. The suspense of the novel is muted in favour of a philosophical approach because the mystery at the heart of this book is more inscrutable: What lies at the root of the cruelties we inflict upon one another?

The answers to this question are not likely to bring much solace. According to Faulques: "The world has never known as much about itself and about nature as it does now, but it doesn't do any good. We've had tidal waves forever, you know.

"What's different is that in the past we didn't try to build four- and five-star hotels along the beach. Man creates euphemisms and smoke screens to deny natural laws. And also to negate his own abominable state. And every time he wakes up it costs him two hundred dead in a plane crash, two hundred thousand in a tsunami, or a million in a civil war."

Markovic's understanding of the question, like himself, is far simpler. The nature of humankind, the nature of the brutality it exacts upon itself, is much like the mural: "Circular, like a trap ... a trap for crazed moles."

In a recent interview with Miranda France of The Telegraph, Pérez-Reverte suggested: "Everything that happens in the book happened for real." He goes on to say, though, that he is not "the tormented type ... I'm not going to go and work for some NGO, it's not in my character. So this book is my solution, my analgesic. It's my way of transforming a nightmare into a ghost."

That he has chosen this stage of his career to find his analgesic is opportune for any number of reasons, but perhaps none more so than the fact that The Painter of Battles will be a bestseller because of the name on the cover – and that in turn means many will read what is surely one of the most important ghost stories to be written in recent memory.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Bernado Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son

Nick Caistor reviews Bernado Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.

The Basques have a word for it. That word is usually unpronounceable and unconnected to any other European language, reflecting the uniqueness of the history of that troubled, distinctive northern corner of Spain. In The Accordionist's Son , one of these words is zulo, here translated as "hiding-place". Over the 60-year period that the novel covers, from the 1930s to the 1990s, this zulo is used for many different purposes, all of them essential to the lived history of the village of Obaba in the heart of the Basque country.
During the civil war in the 30s, "the American" who owns a hotel coveted by the Francoists is hidden there before he succeeds in escaping over the border to France and eventually makes it back to the United States. In the 60s, the novel's protagonist David Imaz spends hours in its dark well as he makes his silent protest at being forced to play his accordion at the inauguration of a monument being erected for only one side of those who fought in the civil war. And in the 70s, when a new Spain and a new Basque country are struggling to emerge as the Franco regime crumbles, the zulo is given a more sinister function: it is used as a prison where the groups fighting for Basque independence keep the people they have kidnapped and are holding to ransom. Beyond this, Bernardo Atxaga suggests, the zulo is a symbol of the state of mind of the Basques themselves: the dark, hidden place where their complex identity is forged and from which they often only reluctantly emerge.

The novel begins and ends far from Obaba. Like many Basques, the Imaz family have been forced to emigrate. For reasons that become clear only later, David has gone to join his Uncle Juan in California. The opening centres on David's death and the arrival of Joseba, his closest friend from the Basque country, to attend his funeral. David's American widow Mary Ann presents Joseba with her husband's long memoir about his life before emigration and his explanation of how he arrived in California, and it is this memoir that constitutes the bulk of The Accordionist's Son. Born in the 50s, David finds himself surrounded by adults who bear the scars of a war he did not participate in and whose meaning he only gradually comes to understand. As he does so, he realises not only that his father Angel (the accordionist) was on Franco's side, but that he could have been directly responsible for the deaths of seven people in their home village of Obaba. Growing to manhood, David rejects his father's view of the world, with its illusion of progress and attraction to the sophistication of life beyond the village. He himself is far more drawn to the countryside, to horses, the forests surrounding the green valleys, his "peasant" friends, Joseba and local girls, the link with the land and the sensual pleasures of being immersed in still unspoilt nature.

Despite this, David accepts the need to go away to university to study. There in the early 70s he meets fellow students who are much more politically aware than he is. They do not simply feel nostalgia for the village life of the Basque country - they see it as somewhere that has always suffered at the hands of the Spanish, with Franco as simply the most recent manifestation of this oppression. They are determined to take advantage of his disappearance to win independence at last. Almost without realising it, David and Joseba find themselves drawn into this movement, until at the climax of the book they are faced with the choice between espousing violence to win freedom and accepting that yet again others will decide their future for them - in many ways the same choice as that faced by their parents' generation.

In all his work, Atxaga delves into the impact of the political on individual lives. What is most moving in The Accordionist's Son is the push and counter-push of these pressures on a believable individual (and Margaret Jull Costa's elegant and unfussy translation gives us a clear view of him in English) as he contends with the weight of history and a sense of belonging, and assesses his possibilities for action.

The conclusion to the novel is in many ways a sombre one. David rejects using violent means to preserve his garden of Eden, and in so doing is expelled far from it, to a 21st century in which Basque shepherds tend their sheep in the parks of San Francisco. Escape from the zulo can only come at a huge cost.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Spanish poet Ángel González one of Spain's most prominent poets and member of a literary generation known for its opposition to the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, died last Saturday at the age of 82.







Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish 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.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
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.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son

Ed King reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.

The publication of his first novel, Obabakoak, in 1993 established Bernardo Atxaga as a literary voice of startling originality and a passionate guardian of Basque national memory. The traumatised characters that populate his novels have, for many, come to embody the open wounds of a community still trying to come to terms with its bloody past.

The Accordionist's Son, first published in Euskera (Basque) in 2003, is his most ambitious novel to date, encompassing a vast swath of Basque history from the Civil War of the 1930s through to the transition to democracy in 1976. But it's also Atxaga's most personal novel, a eulogy to the lost country of his youth and a moving defence of his role as a writer.

David Imaz, the book's protagonist, lives in self-imposed exile on a ranch in California. Feeling increasingly disconnected from his native Basque country, he decides to write a 'memorial' and trace the evolution of his life from his childhood in the repressive environment of post-war Spain to his decision to leave the country and never return.

His recollections pay particular attention to his political awakening, triggered by the discovery of his father's association with the Fascists during the Civil War. As David uncovers his father's dirty secrets, he grows increasingly politicised and eventually decides to abandon his village to take up the armed struggle for Basque autonomy.

David's yearning for the past is always described in terms of his relationship with his mother tongue and some of the most touching moments in the novel are his laments over the disappearance of his language. When he senses words passing into obsolescence, David mourns their death like cherished friends, burying them next to his family members on the ranch.

But this isn't just nostalgia. For Atxaga, language is always political. When Franco's troops try to stamp out Basque nationalism in David's village, one of the first measures they take is to ban the speaking, learning and writing of Euskera. (Writing in Euskera was still illegal when Atxaga started publishing in the 1970s.)

When David is caught reading a volume of Basque poems it is viewed as subversion and it's ultimately as a defence of his language and culture that he justifies his role in the terrorist organisation ETA.

But this isn't just a portrait of a terrorist as a young man, much less a defence of Basque nationalism. Atxaga's great strength is his talent for conveying in such simple terms the moral complexity of his characters.

As the complex web of David's regrets and longings slowly unravels, the novel conjures a compelling image of a man trapped by the horrors of his past.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son

Tom Deveson reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.

“All books, even the harshest, embellish life,” declares David Imaz, the principal narrator of this superb novel. He’s earned the right to say so and the right to be wrong. It’s not smug literary theory but a recognition of the complex relationship between what happens to us and what we say about it. The book moves skilfully between David’s time in America in the 1990s, his youth in the Basque country in the 1960s and the experiences of his parents’ generation during the Spanish civil war.

At its heart, it’s a wholly convincing account of families and friendship. We meet David’s teenage friends as they play, quarrel and develop rivalries and loyalties; we share his desperately painful suspicions about his father’s support of fascist atrocities and the drowsy eroticism of his feelings for Virginia – “ la paysanne” – who is betrothed to a sailor; we witness his delicate courtship of his American wife, with all the tenderness and strangeness of flirtation and unspoken love. Like Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera, Bernardo Atxaga excels in portraying youthful rites of passage against a merciless, often mendacious history.

The history goes deep. As a boy, David is aware of the much older Virgilian world of shepherds and wolves, and the growing and grinding of grain. There are echoes of Petronius, Ovid and Martial; the “hissing leaves” speak with Virginia’s voice and the toads croak harsh warnings. But the “ancient people” among whom he grows up are already losing their memories. Motorbikes appear beside the horses, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s hits feature on the radio, contrasting with the “sadder music” of the accordion songs that David learns from his father. To his American children, his memories will seem “from another galaxy”.

History’s worst cruelty is that a civil war is never finished. David sees old lists mentioning locals who were shot and tries vainly to forget them. Another narrator (these shifts in perspective are achieved smoothly) describes horrifying reprisals and a pool of blood on the ground. A hiding place used in the 1930s is needed 30 years later as Franco’s police sniff out subversion. The mere fact of speaking Basque or not playing the accordion for a ceremony becomes a political act; victims become executioners.

Language and loss are intimately connected. David’s country friends said “happy” or “unhappy”, not “obsessive” or “paranoid”. His student friends, however, say “alienation” as naturally as the peasants say “ mitxirrika” when they point to a butterfly. There is not a sermon here about what is or isn’t authentic, and no moral sleight of hand to prove one way of life inherently superior.

What counts most is true feeling and intensity. David’s premature death is mentioned on page two, and its approach is sensed throughout the final pages. In between, the killing of a horse, a bird or an insect are all the more moving for being placed against the atrocities that human beings perform on one another. Even as David meets his wife, he notices the baleful movement of a clock’s pendulum. But death doesn’t have the last word. Atxaga’s dextrous interweaving of themes and vibrant evocation of people and places make the book not an embellishment of life but a celebration of its richness.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish 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.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Peruvian Literature

Nadal Prize 2008

Francisco Casavella won the 2008 edition of the Nadal Prize with his novel Lo que sé de los vampiros.






Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Juan Marsé

Juan Cruz on the 75th anniversary of Juan Marsé.

Juan Marsé leyó cuando era niño unas líneas de Ernest Hemingway al principio de Las nieves del Kilimanjaro y toda su vida ha querido alcanzar con su propia escritura la música misteriosa de ese texto. Ahora va a cumplir 75 años, mañana, 8 de enero, y sigue pensando en el sonido de aquel párrafo que le cautivó en la infancia.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Zoé Valdés: La cazadora de astros

Luciana De Mello reviews Zoé Valdés' La cazadora de astros.

Aún así, el gesto de rescate es valorable: detrás de la pintora catalana hay una época, una lucha, una ideología para contar. Es justamente un cuadro de Remedios Varo lo que le da nombre a esta novela. La cazadora de astros ha sido cazada. Zoé Valdés atrapó su vida con una mirada y quiso que hiciera de la suya una obra de arte.

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Cuban Literature