Notebooks of Don Rigoberto [Paperback]

Mario Vargas Llosa (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1997

A companion to the scandalous bestseller In Praise of the Stepmother, Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel is "an amazingly seductive work" (San Francisco Chronicle).

The boundary between physical reality and the imagination has been at the heart of literature in Spanish ever since Don Quixote. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, his most generous and ambitious novel in years, Mario Vargas Llosa draws on that tradition to explore the possibilities of imagination in our own time.

Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle: Don Rigoberto himself, by day a gray insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast; his second wife, Lucrecia; and his young son, Alfonso. Husband and wife are estranged because of a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and the boy, a fey, angelic creature who may have seduced her (rather than the other way around). Missing Lucrecia terribly, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies, and unsent letters; meanwhile the boy visits Lucrecia, determined to regain her favor and win her love. The resulting novel, an intoxicating mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.

"Exuberant . . . a roguish and sophisticated sex comedy." --Time

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Since Freud, we've all been aware of the relationship between creativity and procreativity, but few writers have explored the link in such luminous, celebratory detail. Don Rigoberto may or may not be encouraging his estranged wife to engage in lusciously described sex?it could all be inventions in his notebook?and the estrangement may or may not result from a sexual encounter between Do?a Lucrecia and her husband's prepubescent son, but it hardly matters. What matters is the extraordinary language and the way Vargas Llosa makes readers rethink love, sex, and imagination.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus Giroux (January 1, 1997)
• ISBN-10: 0965594912
• ISBN-13: 978-0965594912
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,614,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he lived in Paris. His first story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. Vargas Llosa's reputation grew with the publication in 1963 of The Time of the Hero, a controversial novel about the politics of his country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the restoration of democratic rule.

A man of politics as well as literature, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International from 1977 to 1979, and headed the government commission to investigate the massacre of eight journalists in the Peruvian Andes in 1983.

Vargas Llosa has produced critical studies of García Márquez, Flaubert, Sartre, and Camus, and has written extensively on the roots of contemporary fiction. For his own work, he has received virtually every important international literary award. Vargas Llosa's works include The Green House (1968) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), about which Suzanne Jill Levine for The New York Times Book Review said: "With an ambition worthy of such masters of the 19th-century novel as Balzac, Dickens and Galdós, but with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James . . . Mario Vargas Llosa has [created] one of the largest narrative efforts in contemporary Latin American letters." In 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to broad critical acclaim. In 1984, FSG published the bestselling The War of the End of the World, winner of the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta was published in 1986. The Perpetual Orgy, Vargas Llosa's study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, appeared in the winter of 1986, and a mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, the year after. The Storyteller, a novel, was published to great acclaim in 1989. In 1990, FSG published In Praise of the Stepmother, also a bestseller. Of that novel, Dan Cryer wrote: "Mario Vargas Llosa is a writer of promethean authority, making outstanding fiction in whatever direction he turns" (Newsday).

In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society. In 1996, Death in the Andes, Vargas Llosa's next novel, was published to wide acclaim. Making Waves, a collection of his literary and political essays, was published in 1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, a novel, was published in 1998; The Feast of the Goat, which sold more than 400,000 copies in Spanish-language, was published in English in 2001; The Language of Passion, his most recent collection of nonfiction essays on politics and culture, was published by FSG in June 2003. The Way to Paradise, a novel, was published in November 2003; The Bad Girl, a novel, was published in the U.S. by FSG in October, 2007. His most recent novel, El Sueño del Celta, will be published in 2011 or 2012. Two works of nonfiction are planned for the near future as well.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, December 12, 2006

By 

Damian Kelleher (Brisbane, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Mass Market Paperback)

Don Rigoberto and Dona Lucrecia have recently separated. Dona Lucrecia, in a moment of weakness, extended their game of nightly fantasy and exploration into reality, allowing herself to be seduced by Fonchito, Don Rigoberto's young son from a previous marriage. Now, both Don Rigoberto and Dona Lucrecia are miserable, living apart when all they want to do is be together.

The novel is constructed with several timelines, only one of which is easily identifiable. The main thread of the narrative explores Dona Lucrecia's guilt, but also her growing awareness that Fonchito is the seducer par excellence. He uses his young, lithe body as a constant tool for seduction, and as he learns what makes his stepmother blush and what makes her cringe, he develops his language such that Dona Lucrecia is constantly confused as to just what it is this young man wants from her.

Fonchito's obsession with Egon Schiele, an Austrian figurative painter from the early twentieth century, forms another layer of the novel. He is incredibly knowledgeable about this tortured figure, quoting him incessantly and showing his stepmother Schiele's paintings, a large number of which are erotic or nudes. Fonchito believes that his own life will mimic that of Schiele's, which is to say that he will die of Spanish Flu at twenty-eight. It is worth noting that throughout Schiele's short life, his work was considered obscene, due to the explicit nature of his paintings.

The other, most easily definable aspect of the novel is Don Rigoberto himself. Very often, we learn of Don Rigoberto through his erotic, fantasy-filled discussions with his wife. We are given the impression that the bedroom is where Don Rigoberto comes to life, it is where he is truly a man - outside of it, he is described as ugly, as bland, as grey. But through the erotic coupling of man and wife, Don Rigoberto reveals a passion for drama, for fantasy, for impression.

It is unclear whether Don Rigoberto's discussions with his wife are about fantasies they share, of experiences she has had, or whether the entire situation itself is a fantasy. Llosa weaves his tale in such a way that we are left - not confused - but guessing. Do all these extremely varied and erotic encounters really happen to Dona Lucrecia? Why does Don Rigoberto allow them if, by his own admission, they tear his heart and wound his soul? Are the stories just that - devices for mutual titillation?

The passages where Dona Lucrecia describes her adventures to Don Rigoberto are usually extremely erotic, as well as beautifully written. Llosa does not shy away from even the most taboo of taboos, so a brief warning should be made. While the writing is always tasteful, and more often than not ambiguously shrouded with metaphor and simile, there is no denying that topics such as bestiality, incest and so forth might be too much for some readers.

We come to learn of Dona Lucrecia and Don Rigoberto's relationship best through their bedtime conversations. There is the gentle give and take of the married couple, the words left unsaid and the ones that shouldn't have been mentioned. There is an overwhelming sense of comfort and knowledge that is often touching - these scenes are written by a man with a clear eye for the erotic awareness that a couple must surely have after ten years together.

If you were to strip the eroticism out of the novel, there would not be much left - this is a novel on love alone. A passage towards the end, titled 'Letter to the Reader of Playboy, or A Brief Treatise on Aesthetics', is the clearest statement of the entire piece. This is Llosa's impassioned cry for the secretive withdrawal of eroticism, the sacred bond that a couple shares with one another. He decries the commerce of these magazines, recognising that they de-mistify, but also de-eroticise what should be the magic and splendour of sex and love. He says, '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 and these organs not mere servants to the phantoms that govern our souls and segregates physical love from the rest of human experience.'. We can but only agree.

Possible the greatest difficulty of the novel is that we don't know what to trust and who to believe. There are early indications that Dona Lucrecia's grand adventures - a week-long trip to New York and Paris among the greatest inventions - are completely fictional, but there are also hints that they might all be true. As the novel progresses, we are exposed to greater, less likely situations, and in these, the language used indicates still further the dreamlike quality of the narrative. But is it a dream? Does it all come down to what is recorded in Don Rigoberto's notebooks? The answer, when it comes, is both surprising and expected. The novel ties itself into a neat bow and really, it couldn't be any other way.

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is a fascinating journey through the sexual lives of a couple that are both sexually and emotionally comfortable with one another. While erotic, it is never vulgar, and deserves a place alongside Marquez' magnificent essay on love, Love in the Time of Cholera, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Roth's The Dying Animal.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny and thought-provoking, November 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Mass Market Paperback)

I really liked this book- Vargas Llosa explores everything from sex (a lot of it) to nationalism to art. Fonchito's character was fascinating and I found myself ready to read a biography of Schiele after I finished.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful!, July 20, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Elon College, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Hardcover)

I was already a big Vargas Llosa fan, but I truly enjoyed this playful, erotic romp through literature, philosophy, psychology, and of course, art. I found getting to know the character of Don Rigoberto fascinating and highly entertaining. His notebook letters (never sent) skewering everyone from jocks to feminists are hilarious, and reveal much about the man who ultimately must make some hard decisions about his life. As many reviewers have pointed out, this is not a book to be read for its page-turning storyline, but rather one to be savored and wallowed in. It makes me wish I could read it in the original Spanish. Happy reading!