Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa announced his new novel “Travesuras de la nina mala” (Mischiefs of the Bad Girl) as the story of his life and love. If all the women in his life treated him like that, one can only feel pity.

W.H. Auden once said “If equal love is impossible then let me be the one who loves more”. After reading MVLL’s latest novel, I can only conclude that Auden must have been right.

The tortures of the main character Ricardo - who is madly and wholeheartedly in love with the “bad girl” (la chilena, Madame Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Curico – just to name a few of her many synonyms) -, seem rather pale compared to the hell in which the cold blooded heroine and her changing partners have to rot.

This hell is place for survival, for sexual perversion. There is no friendship or warmth, let alone love. Ricardo, the author’s alter ego, meets the bad girl - who started her con woman career at a very early age – during their childhood in Peru. Ricardo falls in love her because of her mambo-acrobatics and profound irony. He loses track of her, finds her again, runs into her on various continents because of his work as a translator. Wherever he goes he meets the same bad girl, always carrying a different name. His best friends die like flies, always at a very young age and of different causes, and the bad girl always has her finger in the pie.


While searching for the mysterious and evil girl he wanders through bizarre microcosms, through the new-rich world of horse fanatics, the blossoming hippie culture in London or the Japanese underworld which mostly consists of smuggling aphrodisiacs.

Between each encounter with the object of his desire, Ricardo takes comfort in translating the masters of Russian literature to balance out his increasing moral decay and heartbreak. The most interesting ‘fella’ in the book however is not Ricardo but his translating buddy who calls himself El Trujimán de Château Meguru. “Dragoman” speaks ten languages and collects tin soldiers.

If you take MVLL by his word after saying that his novel is half autobiography and half fiction, then he doesn’t go easy on himself or on his image that the world should perceive. Vargas Llosa works little wonders so that readers won’t lose their sympathy for Ricardo despite his Madame-Bovary-like miseries. During his course of life poor Ricardo has to realize that he has distanced and grown so far apart from his home country Peru, making him a victim of is own passion and an international homeless person. He bravely confronts intellectual trends of his time and reveals dutifully to have read Foucault. Somehow this smells as if someone wants to render his account.

Ricardo’s excursion to Japan, where he meets the bad girl and the “Dragoman”, illustrates the severance from his roots in a very clever way. His obsession for the cold blooded beloved - who is playing with him by using every trick in the book to which he obeys blindly -, leads to the erotic highlight and also the most blatant downfall. Vargas Llosa’s finesse in leading the reader with little tidbits to the impending abyss is one of the novel’s strongest moments.

Without a doubt these moments always occur when the storyline subtly drifts into satire and absurdum, a specialty of Latin American literature. In this episode the bad girl’s traits become even more monstrous.

It almost seems that this time Ricardo may have actually learned from his ruinous experiences because he no longer picks up the phone when the bad girl calls. However, as soon as the lovers finally agree on a date and location, MVLL cannot completely avoid the danger of pathos and lengthiness. But one should grant this great Peruvian writer, - one of the leading intellectuals of the Spanish speaking world -, the temporary catharsis. As long as his detailed vision of love expresses the hope for closeness, which in the end remains an illusion, the reading is rather breathtaking.

Those who expect Vargas Llosa’s latest novel to be another expression of what made him famous, could be rather disappointed. Gone are the numerous opulent details in cinemascope-like formats illustrated in “Death in the Andes” or “The feast of the goat”. By moving the story’s location from Peru to Europe he also breaks up his previous writing styles. His wording becomes less “cluttered”, less garnished, the focus on the actual storyline increases, which makes his work more refreshing and easier to read. It becomes obvious that MVLL has finally arrived in the new millennium. It is a place of homelessness.

tags : Peru literature MVLL MarioVargasLlosa culture writer book novel review

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