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4.0 out of 5 stars
Life as soap opera, Dec 28 2003
This entertaining and humorous novel by the well known Peruvian/Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa is a thinly disguised account of his eighteenth year of life during the 1950's in Lima, Peru. The author, nominally a law student whose physical absence from classes is matched only by his lack of interest in same, begins a madcap romance with his 32-year-old "Aunt" Julia (related only by marriage, not blood), recently divorced from her Bolivian husband and returned to Lima to live with her family. The two must keep the "affair" secret from their extended family and his violent and domineering father who resides in the U.S. For help they turn to a cousin, the coquette Nancy, and her devoted would-be boyfriend, Javier. Young Mario ("Marito" or "Varguitas to his friends and Julia) works in the news department of the local radio station in the last years before television, and there meets Pedro Camacho, the station's new director and writer of over-the-top soap operas, also recently arrived from Bolivia. Camacho is a prolific and eccentric hack who lives only for his "art," while Mario is a would-be short story writer whose ambitious work product ends up in the waste basket because it fails to meet his own artistic standards. As the plot unfolds Mario's life and Pedro's art spiral out of control, and both their lives come to resemble Pedro's fantastic on-air creations. Julia and the under-age Mario fall in love, their affair is discovered, and they begin a frantic search for a corrupt and/or ignorant magistrate who will marry them before the arrival of his revolver-toting father hell-bent on separating the two and sending Julia packing. Pedro develops a series of super-popular soaps (the 10:00 o'clock, the 11:00 o'clock, the 12:00 o'clock, etc., etc.) only to see his success threatened when the exhaustion brought on by his 24-7 work schedule causes him to confuse the characters and the plot lines. Will the lovers-on-the-lam find a sympathetic magistrate somewhere in Peru before our hero's fire-breathing father catches up with them? Can Pedro Camacho sort out his soaps before outraged listeners deluge the station management with so many complaints that they fire him? Will Mario ever realize his life's goal of becoming a real artist? Can Pedro "get a grip" or will he descend into madness? For answers to those and other pressing questions, tune in tomorrow! . . . . No wait. You'll have to read the book.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A funny read, Nov 15 2003
What a wonderfully structured book!. I don't want to go into detail about this as it would give away the game. It is a very funny book about a peruvian radio station in the 50's and the characters who inhabit it. Gives a wonderful flavour of the place .
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Life as soap opera, life as art, Aug 8 2003
At its most basic level, Vargas Llosa's most famous novel is a portrait of the writer as a young man. The semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Mario is a young student and would-be writer whose careers and aspirations are disrupted when he falls in love with his aunt-in-law, much to the horror of their many friends and relatives living in Lima. Pedro Camacho, an eccentric (to say the least) Bolivian scriptwriter, has been hired at the radio station where Mario works, and the youth envies the prodigious output of Pedro's intricate soap operas and hopes to learn from his new mentor the secrets of being an artist. The chapters alternate between descriptions of Mario's amusing and increasingly complicated life and Pedro's formulaic and decreasingly coherent scripts, as each character is gradually overwhelmed by the burdens and expectations they've created for themselves.On a deeper level, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" is about artistic failure: Mario's writing suffers because he is too busy living life to the fullest, while Pedro's well-being deteriorates because he barely experiences life at all. While Mario's life is the stuff of literature, his various attempts at short fiction are too concerned with artistic affectation: heavy symbolism and laborious overwriting doom his every effort. In contrast, the scriptwriter is so overwhelmed maintaining the pace of the scripts for ten different serials that he can't keep track of his own sense of reality, much less his fictional characters and elaborate plots. The final chapter, which some readers have found disappointing, actually completes this theme: the writer who balances a passion for life and devotion to art is the one who ultimately succeeds. I was about a third of the way through this book when I realized that I'd already read it, about twenty years ago. I think the reason that this novel didn't make much of an impression on me when I younger is that, in spite of the book's literary themes and the author's competent prose, the book remains true to its soap opera motif. Also, other than the three main protagonists, Mario's many relatives and coworkers are as indistinguishable as the heroes and victims in Pedro's soap operas. Still, given the popular and critical success of this novel, I'm actually surprised it seems to be out of print, and the reader looking for a light, humorous romp through Lima will be well rewarded by hunting down a used copy of this book.
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