Customer Reviews

The Bad Girl: A Novel

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mario Vargas Llosa's marvelous new novel, THE BAD GIRL, revolves around the on again, off again relationship of two expatriot Peruvians living mostly in Europe in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. She is the eponymous "bad girl," so nicknamed by her tortured but ever-faithful paramour Ricardo Somocurcio, whom the bad girl in turn has nicknamed "the good boy." The opposition in their nicknames carries through to their peculiar relationship, one that combines various degrees of lust and indifference, trust and betrayal, obsession and disdain, greed and charitability, dominance and submission, using and being used. These are not just one-way arrangements, however, as Llosa leads his two protagonists through role reversals as well, not all of them necessarily mutual. In the end, the bad girl and the good boy may well form one of modern literature's most striking codependencies, with nearly all the negative consequences such relationships entail.

The bad girl begins as a poor immigrant Chilean student named Lily in Miraflores, Peru, the small town from which young Ricardo hails. Young Ricardo falls head over heels for the elusive fifteen-year-old girl until she suddenly disappears from town. Several years later, Ricardo is in Paris, pursuing his simple dream of living in the city of lights while he begins his career as a translator for UNESCO. Through his friend Paul, an aspiring Latin American revolutionary living in Paris, Ricardo meets a young rebel recruit named Arlette. He quickly discovers that Arlette is the former Lily. Arlette is packed off to Cuba to join the revolutionary army and once again, a handful of years later, Ricardo finds Lily/Arlette in Paris once again, now the well-heeled wife of a Frenchman named Robert Arnaux. This pattern of donning new and successively more aggressive identities will characterize Lily's life and relegate Ricardo to being her touchstone, the one stable element of her existence.

Lucy/Arlette/Mrs. Arnaux proves herself a chameleon in human form, able to adapt her personal appearance, style, and language to fit each role she assumes. Her chameleon is also a heartless carnivore, a snake readily shedding its skin for a new life and a shark devouring its prey and intent on its next target. Her goals are simple - money and power, in that order. Ricardo, on the other hand, seeks only to live a modest life, as long as he can live it in Paris. As a nondescript translator and interpreter of Spanish, French, and Russian, Ricardo is the ultimate intermediary, a selfless purveyor of other people's words and ideas with barely an identity of his own. At times, he virtually revels in his anonymity, as if his profession absolves him of responsibility for committing or acting when so many of his friends and acquaintances are involved in political action. For much of the book, Ricardo is a literary Zelig, one who periodically submerges himself entirely in the bad girl's persona, as much or more out of lust than out of love. In so doing, he becomes a near-perfect enabler for the bad girl's risky, money-seeking behaviors.

Between or during each of her new identities, the bad girl experiences a "good boy" interlude with Ricardo that contrast his humble life style and expectations with her insidious drive for wealth and status. Llosa is careful, however, not to have us see Ricardo as a saint but rather as a bit of an addict, an emotional masochist who simultaneously desires and resents his abasement by the bad girl. Conversely, the author demonstrates that the bad girl is not without her human and even motherly merits in her relationship with their Parisian neighbors' adopted mute son, Yilal.

THE BAD GIRL traces world events through the revolutionary 1960s into the 1990s, from Castro and the Latin American upheavals to those in Eastern Europe and Russia. Some are inferred from the nature of the conferences Ricardo attends as an interpreter, while others like the advent of AIDS strike closer to home. The one constant referent to outside events is Peru, where his uncle Ataulfo supplies Ricardo with a steady stream of commentary on the perilous state of Peruvian democracy and economics. In many respects, the uncertain and mutually destructive nature of Ricardo's relationship with the bad girl provides a mirror of Peru as a developing nation and its political and economic relationship with the industrialized West and Japan. It is certainly no accident that the bad girl's doomed relationships occur with a Frenchman, a horsy-set Englishman, and a Japanese businessman. Despite their many ups and downs, these two exiled Peruvians ultimately can find peace only in each other's arms. The protean bad girl and the self-effacing good boy, neither successful in the developed world despite their various life strategies and ploys, serve perhaps as Llosa's commentary on his home country's need for self-reliance.

By Llosa's past standards, THE BAD GIRL is remarkably explicit but hardly beyond the bounds of taste. As with so many of his past works, such as THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, Llosa brings some memorable fictional characters into existence and employs them to shed light on the price of unbridled ambition and unchecked obsession in human relationships. THE BAD GIRL is a singularly enjoyable achievement.

(4.5 stars) In 1950, when Ricardo Somocurcio first meets Lily, a "Chilean" exotic in Lima, Peru, he is fifteen, sure of only one thing--that she is the most bewitching creature he has ever known. His young infatuation eventually develops into a lifelong obsession, and his story of how Lily dominates all aspects of his romantic life for more than forty years shows both the mysterious power of unconditional love and the peril of misplaced devotion. Lily is a will-o'-the-wisp, appearing and vanishing, changing names, following the lure of power to revolutionary Cuba, the lure of wealth to Paris, and eventually the lure of both power and wealth to Japan, where her lover is a high ranking yakuza sadist. Somehow, however, she always makes her way back to Ricardo, whom she professes not to love, despite, or perhaps because of, his unquestioned acceptance of her humiliations of him.

From Lima to Paris, London, and Madrid, the story of the "bad girl" and the "good boy" unfolds, exploring all aspects of love and betrayal within the changing settings and political climates of the various countries in which the two have commitments. Whether it be revolutionary Cuba, to which Lily goes as Comrade Arlette; the Tupac Amaru guerilla movement in Peru, where some of Ricardo's friends battle the government; the French revolutionary movement which brought about the downfall of Charles DeGaulle; or the various United Nations conferences in the 1970s and 1980s, which Ricardo attends as a UNESCO translator, love, politics, and violence exist side by side.

Though author Mario Vargas Llosa bases the plot of his book on novels by Flaubert (Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education), he makes Lily an individual--a femme fatale who forever drops in and then out of Ricardo's life--and any parallels with the Flaubert novels remain in the background. Lily, or whatever name she uses when she bursts in on his life, is a product of her times, a woman whose sexual freedom allows her to pursue whatever pleases her, whether that means having an affair with a Cuban leader or engaging in kinky sex with a Japanese gangster. She has no qualms about using Ricardo to solve problems when she is desperate--and then moving on, disappearing unexpectedly and leaving him bereft--as usual. (His constant acceptance of her behavior may make him a problematic protagonist for some readers.)

Vargas Llosa, whose fascination with politics permeates many of his novels, broadens the perspective of this novel beyond that of a love story by tying many of the characters' experiences to revolutionary politics, paying particular attention to Peruvian strongmen from 1960 to 1990. Drawing loose parallels between the bad girl, who represents Ricardo's constantly dashed (and always revitalized) hopes, and political candidates who promise the world and fail to deliver, he sets scenes and brings his characters to life in intense, vibrant prose. Though Vargas Llosa focuses on two people, the bad girl and the good boy, he creates a world around them that is so fully realized that their lives take on symbolic significance: the praying mantis has many parallels in life, love, and politics. Mary Whipple

The War of the End of the World
The Feast of the Goat: A Novel
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel
Who Killed Palomino Molero?

A South American critic wrote of Mario Vargas Llosa, many years ago, as essentially a naturalist and phenomenologist - that is, a writer who considers characterization as secondary to illuminating the sweep of historical and political events.

In "The Bad Girl" Llosa, taking a cue from his literary idol Gustave Flaubert, comes at his main characters head on, this time trying to subordinate history - Lima, London and Paris during the 1960's and 70's - to the greater, more intense reality of the story's central characters, or as Flaubert might have said, sovereign identities. The experiment (for Llosa) fails, this book is no Madame Bovary. The breathtakingly shallow and insipid lovers, Lily (the Bad Girl) and Ricardo, her fellow Peruvian, a professional translator living out his dream life in Paris, seem to blur, as the book progresses, further and further into indistinctiveness and numbing repetition. When lovers within a novel repeat their silly nicknames to each other on seemingly every other page, we know the author's in trouble with his or her book. And in this book, the badder the bad girl becomes the less we sympathize with her, and it's the same in reverse for good Ricardo. The more Ricardo tolerates and absolves Lily of her sexual cruelty, the more we distance ourselves from him. What in this world, we may ask, would lead someone to love a woman who is paid and protected to fart into the face of her sadistic Japanese gangster boyfriend? And why does this sexual adventuress keep returning to a man whose sole preoccupations appear to revolve around saving enough money to buy a tiny Paris apartment and running off, every week, to provide translation at yet another boring bureaucratic event?

Paris, city of lights and love and all kinds of intellectual ferment is elicited by Llosa, through the eyes of Ricardo, as little more than an accumulation of the city's street names. There is, happily, a familiar return to artistic form for this great writer at the end of the novel. Ravaged, predictably, by a deadly disease, Lily is tenderly cared for by Ricardo until her imminent release into death. Within these quiet, dignified final scenes of the book, we are moved by the powerful pathos of fulfilled domestic responsibilities. We are, at last and for a fleeting moment, reminded of Flaubert.

Extraordinary things happened in the summer of 1950 in the Barrio Alegre neighborhood of Lima, Peru. Whereas everyone seemed to be falling in and out and in of love, the premier event at least in the mind of resident Ricardo Somocurcio is the arrival of the two teenage sisters, fourteen or fifteen years old Lily and her slightly younger sibling Lucy. The pair claimed to have come from Chile and Ricardo quickly fell in love with Lily. However, when their claims of escaping their homeland prove false, they vanish leaving Ricardo heartbroken.

Several years later in Paris, Peruvian expatriate Ricardo meets exiled Cuban activist "Comrade Arlette" whom he knew as Lily though she denies it; once again he falls in love with her until she leaves him behind. As the years go by, he keeps meeting his Lily as she becomes Madame Robert Arnoux the wife of a UNESCO official and Kuriko the mistress of a Japanese businessman. Each time they meet she treats him with icy aloofness as he hopes she makes this encounter a wonderful thing because he cherishes his Lily even if he does not know who she really is.

THE BAD GIRL is a fascinating character study that affirms that as you grow older you can only go home to your youth in your memories. Lily and Ricardo are interesting protagonists as the audience never knows who either truly is as Lily remains an enigma throughout and Ricardo no longer has his Peruvian roots to ground him. Their relationship over the years never changes even as she denies each time that she was who he claims she was. Always providing an intelligent thought provoking read, Mario Vargas Llosa writes an odd entertaining tale of two people adrift in a sea of humanity that is also drifting along the ebb tide with memories as the only anchor.

Harriet Klausner

I became interested in Vargas Llosa after he won the Nobel Prize in literature. Since this book is the only one I could find in Indian book stores, I decided to read it.

This is a story obsessive and masochistic love. On the one hand we have our good boy, Ricardo, a mediocre translator with UNESCO with no great ambition, who relishes being treated by a doormat by the bad girl, who shocks the readers after every 30 pages with her insensitiveness and ruthless ambition devoid of any scruples. The bad girl on her part feels attached only to a man who mutilates her rectum and vagina with dildos and forces her to consume powders that makes her fart on his face. The reader is often left to wonder which one is more perverse: The antiques of the bad girl or the limitless sympathy of the good boy for her despite how she treats him or all others around her. The plot involving the bad girl and good boy which has a epic style in the beginning of the novel very soon loses steam, and the authors has to invent a series of most unlikely coincidences to keep his story going.

The good part of this novel is that it gives a glimpse of the social and political developments in Europe and in Peru (for example the rise and decline of the hippie culture in Europe and the rise of ultra-left movement like the Shining Path in Peru) seen from the perspective of a person who belongs to neither of these two places. In fact, often one gets a feeling that the authors is less concerned about developing his plot than he is giving the reader long discourses of these social and political developments. At the end however these long descriptions narrated through the keen and observant eye of the outsider, Ricardo, as he goes along his journey in life, are the only thing this book is worth reading for. However this style, where a writer considers characterization as secondary to illuminating the sweep of historical and political events has seen much better successes in world literature. The best examples are the two novels, "Those Days" and "East-West: Purbo-Paschim", by the Indian (Bengali) writer Sunil Gangopadhyay which I would recommend every reader to read.

In summary, while the book is still worth reading to get a glimpse of a very interesting period in history it does not compare in any way with the fantastic narrative style of the other boom author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

LLosa takes on a world tour . He begins in Peru and gets to Paris and then Cuba , London Tokoyo and Madrid. He tells the story of an obsessive one- sided passionate love- affair in which the hero is repeatedly used and rejected by the 'bad girl' until at the end of the story his love and loyalty is somehow tragically justified. In a sense the characters are not deep. But the writing is fast- paced entertaining and rich in descriptions of places and people. It also provides in its own way a kind of history of Peruvian political life in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also in a certain way a kind of morality fable in which the powerful rich and cruel repeatedly attract the 'bad girl' away from the one who truly loves and cares for her. And yet in the end the lover- hero repeatedly rejected feels that the whole enterprise of his love has been worthwhile.

As a Peruvian teenager, Ricardo meets a girl named Lily and falls head over heels in love with her. No matter how many times he professes his love to her, she rejects him. Years later, living in Paris, he meets her again (with a different name) and realizes he's still in love with her. Once again, he is rejected. They continue to meet in different countries throughout their lives.

The Bad Girl was a tragic love story. I found myself so mad at Ricardo for loving "the bad girl" sometimes that I wanted to slap him. It's hard to imagine a real life situation like this (I'd like to think most people wouldn't be so gullible), but it was still an interesting read. I found it a bit slow going though. I'm thinking maybe that was because it was translated from another language, but I did find myself wanting to keep reading just to find out where "the bad girl" would turn up next. Overall, an enjoyable, interesting read.

At age fifteen Ricardo Somocurcio is completely smitten by recent arrival Lily, an exotic, lithe beauty, in his upper middle-class neighborhood in Lima, Peru. She abruptly disappears one day, actually rejected, being unable to demonstrate an economic background that allowed her to participate in that social setting. And so begins a repeated, life-long situation for Ricardo where he loses Lily and all hope of ever seeing her again only to be reunited every few years in various cities of the world, where his job as an UNESCO interpreter based in Paris has taken him.

The book is a powerful look at the persistence of love and desire despite the callousness of one of the partners. The characters are almost extremes with Lily as the "bad girl" and Ricardo as the "good boy." Yet, as polar opposites and as Peruvian exiles without a genuine home, they are repeatedly drawn toward each other.

The book almost gets bogged down in the machinations of Lily as she constantly finds a better deal than Ricardo with his simple, satisfied life with UNESCO and a small apartment in Paris. Yet the longing, anticipation, and joy of Ricardo, when Lily returns to his life, are palpable. There is no lack of ardent physicality when they reunite. At one point, Ricardo sparing no expense nurses Lily back to health as she returns to him near death after an egregiously exploitative relationship with a Japanese criminal. Lily's mercurial desirability is seen at this point as she unassumingly gets the mute young boy of Ricardo's friends to begin speaking.

For those unacquainted with either Peru or Paris, the numerous places and names could detract, as well as the various Peruvian political movements. The story of course has its improbabilities, but it is the faith of Ricardo, though constantly beaten down, that he can finally make a life with his "bad girl" that drives this story forward from page one.

The plot is not bad, it has all the elements necessary to make it memorable and draw the reader in yet, in its English version the prose is lackluster and discombobulated. In some passages it is so painful to read that I just skipped over.

Another thing that bothered me so, given this is a novel about a translator/interpreter Ms. Grossman should have been careful about translating the names of places, organizations, and things that were essential to the characters (Peruvian)and to those of us who speak spanish.

It drew me nuts that she left the French items intact yet translated "Sendero Luminoso" into "shining path". This is the name of a very ill reputed guerrilla/terrorist organization and she just missed the boat on that one. For readers who speak Mr. Llosa's native language this translation falls short.

Llosa paints this little melancholic masterpiece in quiet hues. Its effect is almost subliminal on the reader who naturally becomes ever concerned with the ever changing, mysteriously engrossing bad girl. I was left with confounded feelings as young Lily had played out her last cancerous enrapturements,but am still somewhat shaken by LLosa's unique perspectives on love and responsibility to a loved one.
When the bad girl is in the book, the novel shines with excitement. The glow wanes too quickly, however, when she is gone and we must hear the non-substantively droll dialogues about peruvian politics. So too are the men in the bad girl's experience. They appear stick-figured and one dimensional. There is only brief hope in her japanese tormentor, but just what is llosa saying here?
In one of the most bizarre sexual scenes that I have read, llosa goes over the top into laughable, and utterly incongruous kink.
All in all, a very good read but strangely unsatisfying. We only get to the surface of the protangonist(who himself seems somewhat androgynous and emotionally amorphous). Right when we are about to feel for them, one is gone; the other too easily disembarks on more tranquil pursuits.
But a powerful ending and a sense of love and lust and quiet obsession being just this way makes this novel a particular standout read.