Product Description

Explores the tragicomic relationship between two artists and their material. While each feeds off the other, the narratives of Mario are nourished by the life around him, those of Camacho by the fantasies engendered by his disintegrating mind. The author's other works include "The Storyteller".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86523 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-17
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

Aunt Julia
Mario Vargas Llosa is a national hero in Peru and ran for president at a critical time in its history, losing to Alberto Fujimori in 1990. Having lived in Peru for a time I was interested in exploring some of his works, starting with one his most celebrated novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Set in the Miraflores district of Lima, this partly autobiographical novel follows an aspiring writer (Mario) working at a radio station that broadcasts daily soap-operas. Mario falls in love with his uncle's estranged wife and their romance is told in alternate chapters to some of the radio station's serials. The blossoming and subsequent deterioration of their relationship is matched by the apparent mental state of the eccentric serial scriptwriter, whose plots become more entangled and confused with each other as the book progresses.

Always willfully experimental, Vargas Llosa is influenced in part by Satre and existentialism but also - more evident here - Modernism, with its emancipated timelines and disjointed narrative. The book begins more conventionally in establishing a nostalgic sense of time and place, warming the reader to its characters and principle relationship. But the deliberate convolution of the various narrational strands becomes more and more unsettling for the reader as Mario and Julia's romance implodes.

Clever, wise, witty and delightfully eccentric
A genuinely entertaining read. Not for years have I read something which has kept me smiling from cover to cover. Occaisional bouts of sadness quickly blend into fiction as Pedro's increasingly bizarre tales intermingle with Mario's increasingly desperate adventures. The deeper you get, the more intriguing and entertaining the weaving of storylines becomes. Lovers of Latin America will find additional warmth and memories in this, but anybody with an eye for a good story should read this. Let's not ignore Helen Lane, who translated this gem and kept the pace, the warmth and the characterisation alive. Gamble. Buy it. If you're dissapointed, then you have my pity. I doubt that Pedro would be quite so generous...

Fascinating semi-autobiographical account
This book is a fascinating autobiographical account of the writer's early days and the forbidden relationship which he entered with his real life aunt,Julia Urquidi, now living in La Paz.The account is sensitively written and interwoven with various stories from a scriptwriter of a local radio station in Lima who used to keep various storylines going without notes and at different stages. The mixture is made more poignant as the relationship degenerates and the scriptwriter starts to become confused. The degeneration signifies the ultimate end to a marriage that was doomed to failure.