Customer Reviews

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Picador Books)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is without a doubt Mario Vargas-Llosa's most entertaining book, intelligent without being difficult and hilarious without being patronizing.

Some of the most subtle points are lost in translation -- "escribidor" in the original title, for example, has a sense of someone simply taking dictation or producing a text by rote compared to the word "scriptwriter" used in the English language version -- but that is the only significant weak point and is not enough to withhold a five-star rating for this wonderful book.

The book's account is semi-autobiographical, with two story lines alternating chapters -- a style employed in several other Vargas Llosa novels -- until they begin to link together like cogs in the gears of the narrative. But it is the way they mesh together that is part of the magic in this book. Without giving away the story line here, let it suffice to say that at certain points you'll find yourself smiling and flipping back through the pages uttering "but didn't he..." or "I thought that..."

The story itself offers a fascinating look at several aspects of life in Peru, one of the most complex and interesting countries in the world. But it does it effortlessly; using a love-torn teenage protagonist, a sexy older woman, an enraged father, an eccentric serial writer, and a compelling cast of misfit radio artists.

Though certain parts (especially the story of Julia) are well documented, the exact extent to which some of the rest of the book is based on real life is still being debated. Every once in a while in Lima, for example, an obituary will mention that its subject was one of the people the unforgettable Pedro Camacho might have been based on, and many old Peruvians have theories about the exact bar or town where certain scenes were set.

Like any writer, Vargas Llosa takes certain artistic license and some people have grumbled about inaccuracies in the text. But I shrug off those complaints: a novel is never meant to be an accurate historical document.

Nonetheless, if you are intrigued enough by the story in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to read more and you understand Spanish, the most important and entertaining of the complaints is by Aunt Julia (Julia Urquidi) herself, called Lo Que Varguitas No Dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say). She also authored a more academic version of the story in English, My Life With Mario Vargas Llosa.

When I really think about it, the worst thing I can say about Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is that I did not want the book to end so soon. Like all great books, the story transported me to another place, in this case it is Lima in the 1950s. Here, aunts like fiction but they don't enjoy literature. And scriptwriters don't write literature, but produce large quantities of fiction.

Before the appearance of television, in Peru, the radio theatre (the ancestor of today's soap operas) was an important presence in the lives of the citizens of Lima. At Radio Central, a scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, uses that stage to manipulate his audience's need for tales of horror and love.

At Radio Panamericana, a young news editor cuts articles out of the local newspapers and rewrites them for news bulletins. He checks his collaborator's appetite for catastrophes and falls in love with his aunt, a newly divorced Bolivian who comes to Lima in search for a profitable match.

The book is actually a slightly fictionalized account of Vargas Llosa's life as a university student. His unusual love story gets out of control, just as the prolific Pedro Camacho's radio scripts start to get out of the control.

I enjoyed the narrative a great deal, the interweaving of different stories involving Vargas Llosa's love story and the tales of the eccentric "scriptwriter".

His stories have a very important meaning - they are unforgettable depictions of Peru of the '50s, with well drawn characters. They act as representatives of Peruvian society, wealthy or poor, intellectual or not so intellectual, everyone with his or her own shortcomings and problems. They are all presented with tongue in cheek, in a well-written realistic story.

This is definitely an entertaining read, and very funny at that. The (autobiographical?) protagonist, Mario, falls in love with his "aunt" Julia (not a blood relation), the kind of relationship that is the stuff of radio soap operas - meanwhile, Mario's coworker and confidant is the enigmatic and pseudobohemian/pseudointellectual Pedro Camacho, the most popular radio scriptwriter in Peru. The rest of the novel consists of excerpts from Camacho's radio serials interwoven (chapter by chapter) with tales of Mario's scampering about with Julia.

My greatest frustration with the book is that it didn't use the full potential of the blurring of lines between "story" and "reality." Unfortunately, the interplay between "story" and "reality" was billed as the theme of the novel, whose chapters alternate between descriptions of "reality" and descriptions of Camacho's fictional world of radio serials. Camacho's various real-life prejudices - e.g., his vitriol for Argentina and his fears about middle age - do diffuse to the stories, but not in any deep or intriguing way, only for some comic interjections. Similarly, the radio serials are mentioned in conversations in the "real" portions of the novel, but not much is done with them.

I was really hoping for the book's last chapter to be a blend of the main story and the stories of Camacho's serials, but no such luck. Indeed, the final chapter, or maybe two chapters, seemed out of place, and not as clever and humorous as the rest of the novel. I was also hoping for Camacho to play more of a role in the story itself. As it stands, Mario's and Camacho's worlds don't really intersect, except for their meetings at cafes.

For a similar back-and-forth technique between "fictional" and "real," try "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World," by Haruki Murakami. Or for a hilarious treatment of the making of radio serials, watch the (coincidentally, also Japanese) movie "Welcome Back, Mister McDonald."

In summary, this is an entertaining book, and a good story, but with wasted potential as far as higher literary aspirations; Vargas Llosa executes his clever structural idea quite sloppily.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter had been on my "to read" list for awhile. This entertaining and humorous book is about 18 year old Mario who lives with his grandparents in Lima, Peru. He has a large family with lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Mario's dream is to be a writer and he works as a news writer for a local radio station, while trying his hand at writing short stories in his spare moments. His Aunt Julia, moves to Lima from Bolivia after her divorce. She is 32 years old and not a blood relation (she is the sister of his uncle's wife). Mario and Julia start spending time together and Mario begins to fall in love with her, which is not something that the rest of their family would appreciate! At the same time, the radio station where Mario works hires a new scriptwriter from Bolivia named Pedro. Pedro writes the scripts and acts in the many radio serials that the station airs. Mario becomes friends with the odd scriptwriter.

The book is written so that alternating chapters tell the story of Mario and his friends and family and the stories in the serials. It is an interesting writing style and reminds me of a few other books that I have read including Blind Assassin by M. Atwood and If on a winter's night... by I. Calvino. I enjoyed this writing style very much and founf the book extermely enjoyable and recommend to anyone who may be looking for a different and light read.

Vargas Llosa is not always a funny writer, but in Aunt Julia the excesses of the incredible Chamaco (the scriptwriter in the title) will have you laugh out aloud (not just smile as most books do) wishing you had some Argentinian friends to abuse them for fun in inimitable Chamaco style. The more realstic part of the book just perfectly balances the wild chapters of radiophonic soap frenzy and make their pulp overblown jokes stnad out even more.

If you'd like to read somethging more serious on Peruvian society, as some reviewers expressed the will to do so, and also by Vargas, don't miss 'La Ciudad y los peros'.

You have to be in the right mood to appreciate the gothic soap opera chapters in between the 'real' story of Aunt Julia and the narrator's love affair. The story moves swiftly and amusingly along but at the end - I wish there'd been a lot more. Everything was wrapped up so abruptly and Aunt Julia's eventual fate hanging in the air - I sort of wanted to shake the narrator and ask for more, more gossip, more description (I only have a vague idea of what Peru looks like - it's not a lush travel book for people looking for exotica, but a very funny family romance) and most of all, a little more than pity for the scriptwriter's end. But I adored the soap opera's hysteria!

Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist, Peruvian, is a word painter, an artist of consummate skill, capable of simultaneous intimate ecstasy and detached observation, skill that constantly surprises, titillates and intensifies. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a novel that details how an eighteen year old writer of hack news stories develops relationships with his aunt and, yes, a scriptwriter, both of whom happen to be Bolivian. Auth Julia is an aunt by definable and identifiable, but non-bloodline association. At least there is still some decency! She is a divorcee, not a Peruvian - what would you expect, then? - and attractive to boot. She is also conquerable. She is a passionate older woman - old enough to be his mother! - who succumbs to the young man's ardent if naive charms a little too easily for her own good or, it must be said, for the keeping of face in an interested, gossiping community.

Pedro Camacho is a stunted, bald, pocket battleship of a radio scriptwriter. He is also Bolivian - an epidemic? - and specialises in sitcoms, melees of melange, several of which he can keep on the boil at the same time. He is employed by our young hero's radio station to sex-up the regular offerings, to enliven their action with his peculiar brand of obsessive work ethic, an approach that is occasionally method-school in its execution. So when his character needs an operation, he will sit at his ancient typewriter dressed as a surgeon. He is a great success, even when his lateral thinking approach to plot is fully realised, a trait that develops into a need to introduce characters from one soap opera into another almost at random - certainly at random! - in order to test - or not! - the listeners'collaboration of listening habit and attentiveness at the same time. And thus Dirty Den arrives unnoticed in Coronation Street, armed with his original identity and a plot that no-one registers.

Our hero inhabits a shack on the roof of Radio Panamericana, where he and an accomplice in an ill-equipped office change the occasional word in other people's reports to create broadcastable news, pieces that often serve for days because the operatives cannot be bothered to write anything new. This spirit of professionalism is host to Pedro Camacho, who claims he invented such treatment of fact in order to create soap operas. Meanwhile, our hero seduces his aunt. He is eighteen. She is in her thirties.

And interspersed with romance and radio, sex and sitcom, we have stories from Peru, surreal snippets of lives that get unnaturally intertwined, where Camacho-like characters cross over from one story to another only because they interact. (Is there another way?) Reality is always present, but it can never be trusted to be real enough, for the real thing often approaches from behind and raps us on the head when we least expect it. And so for our hero and Aunt Julia. When confronted with a reality that stands between them and their desires, they relocate, invent a new reality that suits them and thus live in it. For a while, at least, before someone else's reality reinvents them again.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a highly complex, surreal pastiche, a masterpiece from a word painter whose virtuoso imagination sometimes generates just too much colour and surprise, thus amplifying the unreal into fantasy, thus shifting a moving reality into irreverent fairy tale. Overall, Mario Vargas Llosa stops just on the right side of this boundary, making Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter a true joy to read, a book whose process is always going to be more significant, more interesting than its product. It's a book to enjoy impressionistically. Where it goes is where it takes you. The reader hitches the ride. The journey is the end.

Happy Hour! Mario Vargas Llosa (former Peruvian presidential candidate and prolific novelist) gives us two for the price of one: a coming of age story in the form of a memoir (the 18 y old Marito (who hates being called by that name) works as a radio journalist and has an affair with the 32 y old divorced sister of the wife of an uncle; MVL actually married the woman in real life and she later published her counter-version (titled `What Varguitas didn't tell')), plus a bunch of soap texts written by a radio colleague. That does not at first glance sound like a `must read', but it is quite entertaining. It was filmed in the US under the name Tune in Tomorrow, with Keanu Reeves; the film moved the story from Lima to New Orleans. The book is set in Lima during the 50s (Korean War as point of reference), it first appeared in Spanish in 1977, the film is from 1990.

The memoir and the soap chapters are intermittent; the memoir begins to look more and more like the ever more disorderly scripts by the confused colleague. The soap stories play a part in real life and of course real life comes into the soaps, and `real life' of the novel gets mixed up with real life in, well, real life. Much of the fun comes from international animosities in the Latino world: the script writer is Bolivian; he assumes the worst about Peruvians, he hates Argentines (to the point of diplomatic complications), is jealous of Cubans and Chileans. This is all generally in the spirit of good-natured banter, not poisonous. Well, more or less.

I have never followed any of the productions of the soap industry, not in radio, nor in TV, but I begin to suspect that I missed a treat. Camacho's heroes are mostly male over 50 and in fantastic shape (expressing the writer's longing for eternal youth), though they have increasingly odd habits too. They have the most outrageous adventures, full of tempestuous passions. Sometimes borders between stories melt. With time, Pedro has trouble remembering which name belongs to which character and which series. He never keeps his texts, so he can't check it up. Finally he needs to kill them off to clean up his slate. It becomes a virtual herocide, and all extras are thrown into the bargain. A house collapses in an earthquake, a police station gets burned down by thugs, a ship sinks with all on board, stampeding masses in a football stadium are out of control...

It begins so conventionally and then becomes more and more outlandish:
A surgeon discovers at his niece's wedding that she is pregnant from her brother.
A police sergeant picks up an African illegal immigrant in the port area and is ordered by his superiors to kill the man and drop the body in a garbage dump.
A judge investigates a rape case, interrogating a Jehovah's Witness as a suspect, and the 13 year old victim, who turns out to be a nymphet in the Lolita sense.
A fanatic rodent exterminator and family tyrant unexpectedly meets rebellion in his family.
A female (the exception) psychoanalyst cures an insomniac's problem by making him hate children so that he stops having nightmares of the accident that he had.
A peaceful guest at a boarding house goes insane, tries to kill the owner and rape his crippled wife; later he escapes from the asylum.
A slum priest revolutionizes life by training criminals and prostitutes to do their jobs better, but fails with the introduction of a communal life style. (My review title is the doctor thesis project that the Church had not accepted, surprisingly.)
An alcoholic football referee gets to judge the South American Champions final (oddly between a Peruvian and a Bolivian team, highly unusual), which ends in wholesale slaughter.

We never get the endings of these weird suspense stories, they all stop with cliffhangers, until books are closed in the mass murder wrap-ups.
Pedro Camacho writes every half hour episode in not more than one hour, he is phenomenally productive. No writer's block for Don Pedro! He lives like a pauper but has a huge fan base. His miserable living standard and the contrast to the man's apparent success as a writer should teach MVL a lesson, but it doesn't. Mario is sure he will become a writer, and is equally appalled and frightened by Pedro's work style.
The novel is light-handed fun in the sense of `sheer madness'. If I want to find fault, I would say it is about 100 pages too long. Consider a half star deducted.

Aunt Julia and the Scripwriter is one of those rare books that can have you laughing your mind out and at the same time makes you think about some serious topics. Vargas Llosa creates funny situations and at the same time explains and conveys the anxieties of an aspiring writer; his fears, doubts, failures, and experiencies that inevitably leads him to the writing process. The second part of the novel are episodes of soap operas. It might seem--like another reviewer pointed out--that many of these stories are inconclusive. Although, in fact they are inconclusive, these episodes show the reader the mental chaos and ultimate downfall of their writer--Mr. Camacho--in his attempt to cover as many topics as possible.

In a way, these stories symbolize the disaster that trying to write about various topics at once cause, and to a certain extent, is a warning to aspiring authors to try to keep their writings within an established frame.

These two contrasting topics are depicted within a Peruvian society that Vargas Llosa portrays as racist, close minded, socially and economically uneven, and religiously fervent.

This book is a most read for any Latin American or person that wishes to visit Latin America and any aspiring writer because it uses Peruvian society as a microcosm of Latin America and depicts the anxieties of the writing process, respectively.