Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Paperback)

"It is not the world of cunning cattle that you and I are part of which interests me and brings me joy or suffering, but the myriad of beings animated by imagination, desire and artistic skill, the beings present in the paintings, books, and prints that I have collected with the patience and love of many years."

Near the beginning of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, the title character writes these words to the architect designing his new home, thus setting the theme for this slightly fantastical, wholly erotic novel that celebrates the ascendancy of imagination over real life. Readers familiar with Vargas Llosa's work will recognize Don Rigoberto from the earlier In Praise of the Stepmother, in which the author first introduced the middle-aged insurance executive, his beautiful second wife, Lucrecia, and his preternaturally sensual son, Alfonsito. In that book, the pubescent "Fonsito" manages to seduce his stepmother and then writes an essay about the experience that he lets his father read. The novel ends with Lucrecia's expulsion from the household and the revelation that Fonsito had orchestrated the whole thing from the beginning for reasons of his own. Now, in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Vargas Llosa picks up where he left off, with Alfonsito's reappearance on the doorstep of Lucrecia's new home. Once again, this "Beelzebub, a viper with the face of an angel" has a hidden agenda--this time, apparently, to reunite his father and stepmother.

As in its predecessor, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto filters erotic passions and desires through art and artifice; Alfonsito uses the life and work of painter Egon Schiele to seduce his stepmother's imagination if not her body; Don Rigoberto and Lucrecia fan the flames of sexual passion through elaborate fantasies that they present as reality. It is almost as if no act, thought, or feeling can be real unless it has first existed in the imagination; even as Rigoberto and Lucrecia make love on their first night back together he informs her that, in his notebooks, she "'has gone to bed with many people all year.' 'I want details,' Dona Lucrecia gasp[s], speaking with difficulty. 'All of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me.'"

The novel is the literary equivalent of matryoshki, those nests of dolls within dolls that Russian toymakers made to enthrall young children. Egon Schiele's life story, Lucrecia's erotic encounters, Rigoberto's notebooks, the 20 anonymous letters that reunite Rigoberto and his wife--all unfold, stories within stories and fantasies within fiction, until Vargas Llosa arrives, at last, at his happy ending, with a twist. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is erotic without being graphic, so fantastical that even the seduction of a 40-year-old matron by a pubescent boy reads more like myth (think Cupid and Psyche) than today's headlines. Vargas Llosa's cool, wry prose helps to elevate the hijinks above the merely prurient, making this fable of love, art, and manipulation a pleasure without guilt. --Alix Wilber --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.

Love triangles are rarely symmetrical, and the one at the centre of Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother and its sequel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, is no exception. Set in Lima, these erotic novels focus on the domestic affairs of Don Rigoberto, his second wife Doña Lucrecia, and his precocious son Alfonso, who is in love with his stepmother. In its polymorphous perversity, In Praise of the Stepmother is heir to the tradition of Huysman's A Rebours (Against Nature); in its meticulous style, it goes to great pains to differentiate itself from pornography, and emerge as a fascinating study of eroticism.
In Praise of the Stepmother, the innocent dalliance between stepson and stepmother is consummated, and when Don Rigoberto discovers what has been going on under his roof and oversized nose, he separates from his beloved Doña Lucrecia.
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto picks up where the earlier novel leaves off, and like most sequels, it fails to measure up to the accomplishments of the original. Don Rigoberto's fantasies continue in the absence of Doña Lucrecia, while Fonchito acts as a go-between, seeking reconciliation between his father and stepmother. Montaigne's words serves as epigraph to this novel: "I cannot keep a record of my life through my actions; fortune has buried them too deep: I keep it through my fantasies." The boundaries between realism and fantasy are blurred; in addition, Vargas Llosa inserts many discursive digressions in each chapter, so that this novel seems less focused than the first one. Take the transition from the first to the second section of the opening chapter. Doña Lucrecia has been fondly remembering her former life with Don Rigoberto in their little house: "The images came and went, dissolved, changed, entwined, followed one after the other, and it was as if the liquid caress of the nimble jet of water reached to her very soul." The entwined form and subject of The Notebooks follow the course of that sentence, which prepares for the section, "Instructions for the Architect." In this expository section, Don Rigoberto wants his architect to reverse his priorities: instead of giving primary consideration to the inhabitants of the house, the architect should first consider its objects such as books and pictures.
From this architectural inversion, Rigoberto moves on to "The Night of the Cats", a fantasy with cats, Greek honey, and lovemaking to Doña Lucrecia. Pergolesi's music forms part of the background for this scenario because of its association with eighteenth-century Venetian decadence in which cats, disguises, and confusion were reigning elements. In the midst of their lustful encounter, Don Rigoberto evokes in memory Balthus' languid girl, Nu avec chat, Botero's Rosalba (1968), and Félix Valloton's Languor (1896)-each image combining a cat and a nude female. These allusions lend an added dimension to the immediacy of the sexual involvement, and by providing a historic context, comically distance the reader from falling into any trap of Don Rigoberto's imagination. The larger historical frame parodies pornography, distances the reader from the bedroom, and makes us aware of our own tendencies toward voyeurism.
Similarly, the last section, "The Name Fetishist", plays with the protagonist's aesthetic fantasies: "Rigoberto! A laughing cascade of transparent waters. Rigoberto! The yellow joy of a goldfinch celebrating the sun." The chapter closes with a black and white sketch of a naked male body. Such sketches at the end of each chapter provide a light coda to the narrative entries of the "notebooks" and contrast with the more elaborate colour reproductions of the earlier novel. This obsession with painting extends to Fonchito's identification with Egon Schiele throughout the novel.With all the "stripping" in both novels, Vargas Llosa comments: "Pornography strips eroticism of its artistic content, favors the organic over the spiritual and mental, as if the central protagonists of desire and pleasure were phalluses and vulvas ... Pornography is passive and collectivist, eroticism is creative and individual." Vargas Llosa's intelligence guarantees erotic pleasure.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada) --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.