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The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

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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.

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.

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!

...fantasy within fiction, eroticism within contempt for societal `norms'....

this compelling book is an erotic lace-work of the extremely hedonistic yet solitary don rigoberto's mind of absurd surreal life as insurance drone to his idealistic romance with his wife lucretia. interrupted by devil-child.

the themes within themes of this book are highly complex, including an intriguing introduction to egon schieles' artistry. the surprises are endless, as are his essays from life-as-defined-by leisure to the erotic affects of urination.

it is hard to summarise this novel. it covers so many issues that it is a wonder it is only contained within 259 pages. i was craving so much more at the end. mario vargas llosa is a genius once again.

After struggling a little at the beginning, I was amazed at how clear this book was at the end. It integrates art and literature in a very erotic manner... Llosa is hilariously pedantic at times. Funny, serious, winding, and very sensual in so many ways.

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman (FSG, 259 pages, $23, 1998). by Nicholas Patterson

"I read, look at my pictures, review and add to my notebooks . . . but, above all, I fantasize. I dream. I construct a better reality . . . Only when I am in that world, in that company, do I exist, for then I am joyful and content," (p. 226) explains the title character of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto near the end of the novel. This explanation helps make sense of a novel where the line between fantasy and reality is often blurred and the former seems more real than the latter. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is divided between the story of a bizarre love triangle (Rigoberto, his estranged wife Lucrecia, and his young son Alfonso), the fantasies and letters Don Rigoberto writes in his notebooks, and to a lesser extent Lucrecia's dreams. The Notebooks takes up where Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother (FSG, 1990) left off: Rigoberto and Lucrecia have separated after Rigoberto discovers that Alfonso (or Fonchito) has seduced his stepmother (though Fonchito's age is never precisely given, he is portrayed as being somewhere between 10 and 13 years old). Having succeeded in his seduction and in publicizing it to his father through an essay in the Stepmother, Fonchito decides to reunite Rigoberto and Lucrecia in the Notebooks. Fonchito re-enters Lucrecia's life and through conversations about the life and work of his idol, the painter Egon Schiele, tries to convince her to get back together with Rigoberto. Fonchito provides a further catalyst for the couple's reunion by writing two series of 10 anonymous letters to Lucrecia and Rigoberto which each mistake as being written by their spouse. Intertwined with the story of Fonchito's machinations are a series of Rigoberto's and Lucrecia's late night meditations, fantasies, and dreams. Rigoberto, a mild mannered insurance executive, escapes his mundane reality through elaborate games and fantasies involving his missing wife. Physically faithful to his wife, Rigoberto imagines her in a series of romantic interludes with among others: "a twin brother of mine whom I invented, a Corsican brother, in an orgy. With a castrated motorcyclist. You were a law professor in Virginia, and you corrupted a saintly jurist. You made love to the wife of the Algerian ambassador in a steambath. Your feet maddened a French fetishist of the eighteenth century. . . we were in a Mexican brothel with a mulatta who pulled off one of my ears in a single bite." (p. 253-4) Llosa weaves these fantasies together with real life events so skillfully that it isn't until near the end of the book that one knows what has happened and what has been imagined. This ambiguity between fact and fiction, which Llosa has employed in previous novels including Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, emphasizes the idea that the life of the mind is as, and often more, important than the life of the body. Through imagination one can rise above everyday life and create a world as one wants it to be. Llosa suggests that love arises from being able to share this world with another. When Rigoberto tells Lucrecia about his fantasies near the end of the book, Lucrecia responds: "I want details . . . all of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me." (P. 253) Though The Notebooks is filled with sensual and sexual fantasies it is not pornographic. Llosa pulls off this difficult feat by relating erotic work without resorting to graphic imagery (Rigoberto writes a scathing "Letter to the Reader of Playboy" which rails against people who limit their sexual imagination by relying on pornography). The novel drags a little near the end as Rigoberto delves perhaps a little to deeply into a foot fetish fantasy. However, in general, the book has a very quick and exciting pace, in part due to Edith Grossman's translation. Llosa's The Notebooks is an elegant exploration of the psychology of love and desire.

What DON RIGOBERTO lacks in the eroticism of its precursor, IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER, it makes up for in humor and drama. It is a very entertaining if somewhat repetitive book.

Rigoberto, naturally enough, dominates the novel. The wife and son seem a little one or two dimensional and not very developed beyond the first book. But here Rigoberto blazes forth not only as a man of acute erotic passions but as a social critic as well, and his well-measured diatribes against feminists, organized sports, pornography, and men's clubs, of which his eponymous notebooks are composed, are a joy to read.

Loved it. Hilarious and quite titillating. (I'd say more but I read the book almost twenty years ago - this comment is provoked by the news that Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize for literature - and quite deservedly so.)

What a remarkable book! I cannot say much that has not already been said by other reviewers so I won't. The sexual episodes in this book are like nothing I have encountered elsewhere; some are completely original. Plain and simple, the book turned me on--mind and body.

a little bit of scheherazade, a little bit of italio calvino, a little of garcia marquez, and a little bit of john barth's letters. erotica and classy pornography, opulence and an art lover's dream. and of course huysmans' against the grain epicurean, des esseintes, who llosa's don rigoberto follows into the solitude of accumulated sensual pleasures.

don rigoberto commissions an architect to design a house for his objects, his books and his art collection, a house don rigoberto and his second wife and the son of his first wife will share with the possessions. don rigoberto's collection is a precise four thousand objects. in the house is an enormous fireplace. as don rigoberto acquires new purchases, he must choose existing pieces of his collection to consume in the flames of his fireplace to keep his four thousand piece collection extant. what is consumed to the flames is saved, in essence, in don rigoberto's voluminous notebooks. part of the pleasure of reading vargas llosa's don rigoberto is tracking down some of the paintings and writings don rigoberto mentions.

unlike des esseintes, the bachelor, don rigoberto, a twice married man, who centers his wife in his fantasies and erotics, is a father, which raises a moral question: what obligation does a parent have to a child, a father to a son, when the father's predilection is toward perversity? a question that becomes more important when don rigoberto, with his son, separates from his wife, and retreats with his notebooks and letters in his study away from his son who, unknown to his father, pays frequent visits to his stepmother, bringing with him his obsession with egon schiele. some of the artist's drawings are included in the book.

this book is a sequel to in praise of the stepmother. i wish i had read the stepmother before don rigoberto. rigoberto presents a tension, a mystery, that's weakened by reading the book after the stepmother.