The Way to Paradise (Hardcover)

In spite of the lousy writing style, it was interesting to hear more about Gauguin's possible reasons for his use of color, images, locations, etc. And, his grandmother's story was worth hearing about.

Although I would have preferred a book about Gauguin only, THE WAY TO PARADISE is made up of narratives that concern themselves with the life of Gauguin and the life of his grandmother, Flora Tristan, the illegitimate daughter of a Peruvian man and a French woman. Gauguin never knew his grandmother (he was born four years after her death) but the two seemed to have shared several traits in common, something Vargas Llosa highlights.

Gauguin's story takes place during the last twelve years of his life, primarily in Tahiti and the Marquesas, though Vargas Llosa does gives us details of the painter's earlier life in flashbacks. If you don't know much about Gauguin going in, you are going to find yourself lost for most of the book. I had read quite a bit about Gauguin before reading this book, but I am sure there will be many readers out there who haven't.

THE WAY TO PARADISE is far from being a biography of Gauguin, which is what I think a lot of readers are going to expect. I liked Vargas Llosa's choice of not giving us a standard biography, but I think he should have placed his flashbacks a little nearer the beginning of the book so readers who didn't know much about the life of Gauguin would feel less disoriented.

We eventually learn about Gauguin's service in the French Navy and his work in the office of a stockbroker. Vargas Llosa touched on the artist's marriage to the Danish woman, Mette Gad and, after she leaves him to return to Denmark, his time in Pont Aven with van Gogh. The time spent with van Gogh comprises some of this book's most compelling reading.

The facts of Gauguin's years in Tahiti will be familiar to some readers and unfamiliar to others. I think, if one is not at all familiar with Gauguin and still wants to read THE WAY TO PARADISE, he or she would do well to read a standard biography of Gauguin first. I've heard some criticism of Vargas Llosa's writing in the sections depicting Gauguin's years in Tahiti as being "too flamboyant." Personally, I liked the writing style and thought it fit the subject matter perfectly.

I didn't care for Flora Tristan's story even though she was an interesting woman and a woman well ahead of her time. She was also a much more sympathetic character (at least in this book) than was Gauguin, who wasn't sympathetic at all. I simply wasn't looking for a book that concerned Gauguin's grandmother; I was looking for a book that concerned Gauguin.

Flora Tristan was a woman who, by the age of forty, had already lived a very difficult life. These difficulties, however, certainly didn't lead her into self-pity. Instead, she wrote a little booklet, "The Workers' Union" and became a social reformer, concentrating her efforts primarily on France's working class. I found much that was interesting in the story of Flora Tristan, but I also found it somewhat repetitive and, eventually, boring.

A very interesting section of Flora's story takes place, however, when she decides to go to Arequipa, Peru (the birthplace of Vargas Llosa, by the way), to visit her uncle, Don Pio Tristan. She is treated well by her Peruvian relatives and is made to feel welcome in their home, but she doesn't get what she came after-her share of her father's inheritance. And, being illegitimate, there really is nothing she can do about it. In the Peruvian section, Vargas Llosa's writing style is more baroque and convoluted, something I really liked.

I found the last two chapters, which portray the deaths of Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin, harrowing and heartbreaking, despite my lack of interest in Flora and the almost despicable way in which Gauguin was portrayed. Flora was a woman who suffered much heartbreak in her life and Gauguin, despite his faults, was a tortured soul. Neither deserved the suffering they endured.

Even had I been interested in Flora Tristan (and don't get me wrong, she is an extremely interesting woman), I still wouldn't have liked THE WAY TO PARADISE for two reasons. First, it seems as though Vargas Llosa was trying to marry political ambition to artistic fervor in showing us the very different roads these two people took to what they perceived as "paradise." For me, that marriage just didn't work. Second, and this is the most important reason I didn't care for the book, is the style. As long as Vargas Llosa stayed in the third person, I found his writing as masterful as ever. But he inserts himself as a second person questioner throughout the book and this, at least to me, got to be very, very annoying. I'm certainly not questioning Vargas Llosa's choices here; he's far too masterful a writer for me to do that. I'm just saying that this technique didn't work at all well for me and I disliked it very much. For me, it got in the way of the stories of Flora and Gauguin and caused the book to be less than seamless.

Despite my reservations about THE WAY TO PARADISE, I think anyone interested in Gauguin, or anyone interested in keeping up on the writing of Mario Vargas Llosa, should read this book. You might be like me and find that you don't like it quite as well as you expected to, but there's no doubt that it's an important book, from a very important author.

If you're new to Vargas Llosa (you shouldn't be), I would begin with DEATH IN THE ANDES or THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, a book that is quite complex and baroque, but one that is, I think, Vargas Llosa's masterpiece to date.