Customer Reviews

Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl: A Novel)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is another terrific one from MVLL and something really new is that the style is totally different from most of his other novels, the story goes in a straight line to the end, no flashbacks or mixed dialogues among different characters in mixed places or times, it is just a straight tale but a superb one, this fact is important because it will surely content to most people who used to think that his novels were excessively complicated to allow a clear reading.

Personally I believe that MVLL has been telling the stories as he has been feeling them, e.g. Conversation in the Cathedral is precisely that, as a conversation one tends to go by the branches and forgets the main line sometimes, however, all the facts help to construct a view of the story.

Along these years MVLL has also been constructing with each of his novels a complex and a unique technique that probably he abandons now to tell a story from a very simple perspective coming from a simple character and why not to finally reach all kind of readers.

I prefer not to take so much time doing what most people will do reviewing the story, I would just say that it is a lovely but real one (I liked more than Love in time of the Cholera of Garcia Marquez simply because it is just more realistic without a happy ending but with a more likely ending)

This story basically deals with a man who loves a woman without conditions along all his life and even though he regrets his decisions and feelings he concludes that his only inner force comes from this weird love and moreover that the only reason to be alive is to believe that some day they will be together, the story occurs in different times and places all of them described masterfully by MVLL, we can almost see and smell Paris in the 60's, London in the 70's and the things that happened during those years.

What I think is the most important fact of this novel is that MVLL used to have a debt with his public, he probably never constructed before so rich a female character as he does with the Bad Girl in this novel, he didn't make it as well with the Aunt Julia nor with Flora Tristan and the other women in his novels, this character (the Bad Girl) is so rich and complex that shines itself, Bad Girl's intricate mind is finally almost comprehended at the end of the story when Ricardo can join all the pieces of her story and knows her father in Peru, well MVLL has just paid his debt.

With this novel MVLL shows to the world that he possesses one of the widest horizons in the contemporaneous writing, after a very hard research work, he is able of telling a story based on himself as a school boy (La Ciudad y los Perros or Time of the Hero), of describing the most terrible "misunderstanding" in the Brazilian backlands during the XIX century (The War of the end of the world, for me one of his best two novels, the other is Conversation in the Cathedral), of telling vividly the story of one of the scariest dictators in the XX century (the superb Fest of the Goat), of telling the story of Gaugin and Flora Tristan and their search for "paradise" whatever it meant for them and now, with this extraordinary tale, of giving us an extraordinarily strong story about love but fundamentally about the human nature and the inevitable flow of time.

I'm so tempted of writing an open letter to the Nobel's Academy to ask for him this year's Literature Nobel award, I cross my fingers to avoid the idea that like Borges he could die without win it, If someone wants to join my crusade just write to my e-mail.

I wrote this comment in English but I red the novel in Spanish, I think it will be translated soon to the English.

Enjoy this extremely nice reading.

Vargas Llosa has a powerful and dynamic storytelling style. It reminds me of Nabokov. The characters, the descriptions, the cameo appearances of various relatives and friends- all lend a depth that makes this more than just a memoir-like novel.

Su manera de escribir es poderosa y encantadora. Que escritor mas imponente- antes de este libro, he leido solamente La tia Julia y el escribidor, pero ahora quiero leer otros de sus libros. Sugeriencias? La violencia no me apetece.

I just want to make a correction to jC "iRebel" (Andover MASS). This book is a novel written by Mario Vargas Llosa. The author of "Liberty for Latin America" is Mario's son, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who is a journalist. This novel does not have anything to do with politics or economics, it is a love story.

By the way, I read the book in spanish and it was just great, however it is not one the greatest of Mario.

This is one of the best books I've read in 2006, if not the best. It tells the story of a man slaved and abused by a woman - "La Niña Mala", the bad girl - he keeps loving for his whole life. He's a looser, she's someone who spends her whole life looking for grandeur, richness and pleasure. She comes to, and goes from, his life, always being accepted and always despising and abandoning him. And his life - he, a Peruvian as Vargas Llosa himself - takes place in the rebel Paris of the 60s and in the swinging London of the 70s. He's a man who never had another woman in his life than the "bad girl" - and that never really had her, who always had him.

I have recommended the book to many people; all of them have been thrilled and have compulsively read - and have suffered with the man and loved the book.

I have read it in Spanish (as written by Vargas Llosa), but there is an English translation.

Pobre Ricardito: Este "pichiruchi" (un mal pagado traductor) ama a una chica cuyo nombre verdadero ni siquiera se enterará hasta muy tarde en su vida.

Pero despacio: La historia de amor ya comienza en el verano de 1950 en el distrito limonense de Miraflores dónde el niño bueno (Ricardo) se enamora de la niña mala quién por aquel entonces aún se llamaba Lily. Pero no dura mucho tiempo el romance. Ricardo se va a Paris para trabajar como traductor y interprete. Pero - ¡que sorpresa! - la niña mala, ahora convertida en la camarada Marxista Arlette, también se encuentra allá. Comienza otra breve romance hasta que la niña mala se fue a Cuba.

Después de su regreso a Francia a la niña mala le gusta mudarse de nuevo y se encontrará en Londres durante la era de los hippies. ¿Y quién crees le seguirá a la niña mala hasta allá? Sí, claro: Ricardo. No voy a continuar aquí para no revelar demasiado, pero claro, hay algún punto en que cambiará drásticamente toda la historia...

Es una historia sobre traición, obsesión, decepción, una ambición desmesurada y sobre todo sobre las muchas facetas de amor. Ricardo es una persona típicamente pequeñoburguesa y la niña mala es una persona que aspira mucho a la felicidad económica. Qué va a ganar: ¿el dinero o el amor? ¿Qué crees?

Creo que hay gente - como yo - a quién le gusta muchísimo leer este libro; pero posiblemente haya otro tipo de gente a quién no le va a placer mucho ésta ultima novela del hombre más famoso de Arequipa (la ciudad blanca de Perú). El razón es que Travesuras de la niña mala es un libro bastante diferente a los demás de Vargas Llosa.

Escrito en el estilo clásico de las love-stories del siglo XX, MVLL me sorprendió grandemente con esa novela. Como ya mencioné antes, yo amo este libro. Muchas gracias Mario por ésta excelente novela!

This review is based on the Brazilian translation into Portuguese of this book.

I have been a reader of Mario Vargas Llosa's books since I fell in love with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, many years ago. At first Mischievous Bad Girl showed the wonderful narration that makes Llosa's works so easy to read. He has a fascinating tempo, present in all of his books, which carries the story to the end, without boring the reader. Indeed he is so seductive in his narration that he always appears to have the reader on his side from the first word onwards.

However, I was bothered by the main characters. For the Bad Girl is very bad, indeed, and our "hero" or "anti-hero," Ricardo, appears too flexible to have ever had a backbone.

So, with a couple of characters that I could not feel sympathetic with, it took me a while to come to terms with the essential question of the book: what is love? How does it manifest itself? And the discussion about what's accomplished with this story can only begin at this point.

Is love something that requires total abdication of one's self? Is love something that needs to be so total as make you challenge your own self preservation? These are timeless questions and very worthwhile considering.

I have seen in other places on the NET complaints about his depiction of different decades, about data errors regarding "when such fashion was introduced in London," "if restaurant such and such is located correctly in Paris", and so on. It's all Ivory Tower preciousness, in my opinion, something like Graduate Students' games. Llosa is not writing History. Llosa wrote a novel. He has to be given latitude. On the whole I think he was quite capable of bringing to mind the essential spirit of the times when he covered several decades in the latter part of the 20th c.

I believe that like his other books this will be a MUST for readers engaged in pertinent questions of BEING.

FIVE STARS. *****

It is a book that takes you into your own individual life and experiences. You do not need to be Peruvian, French or Cuban. That is an existencial journey, the search of your own destiny, enjoying life despite all adversities you may encounter in your path. The language structure and syntax Vargas Llosa uses in this novel, can always give you duality of meaning, depending on how you read a definite sentence. You feel traveling throught ages, culture, events than circunvent the story, and the ending is not an end. It is a begining of a new life.

I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed with this book, it feels like the same situation keeps repeating throughout the whole book. The characters don't change or evolved, even after 20 years have passed.

Como aficionado acérrimo de MVLL desde la Ciudad y los Perros, encontré esta última novela bastante decepcionante. El personaje central se tilda a sí mismo de cacaseno, precisamente el vocablo que utilizaba MVLL contra los apristas en las elecciones del 90. Pero es más un aburrido total sin pizca de la picardía limeña. Cuando el personaje estaba a punto de tirarse al río en París, daba ganas de darle un buen empujón para ahorrarnos por lo menos cien páginas más de tortura. Y su contacto con las eventos sociales de las últimas décadas se asemeja a la de un Forrest Gump quien todo lo ve y nada lo capta. Pero quien diga que la vena de MVLL ya se acabó se equivoca: la reciente Fiesta del Chivo es fenomenal.

Los hinchas del fútbol tenemos que clarificar una error en el libro: el compadre de Valeriano López en el Boys (y luego en el Alianza) en los años cincuenta fue don Willy Barbadillo, no Jerónimo Barbadillo quien militó en la selección del 82.

If Mario Vargas Llosa wanted his latest novel "Mischiefs of the Bad Girl" to make an impression, lasting or not, on the minds of his readers, I have to say that he succeeded. First: his excessive efforts to give veracity to the story can end up disappointing those who are just starting to familiarized themselves with his great literary legacy. Second: his obvious insistence on getting so specific about the historical context in which this novel's characters move, can disappoint more than one of those readers who do pay attention to the details. Yes, both could end up remembering it, not like his best, but like a novel that lacks the creative height that is expected of this perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize of Literature.

The numerous touches of realism, impregnated with actual past events, with which he tries to infuse elements of credibility to this story, can be, to say the least, overwhelming. The political and social information is excessive, doesn't seem to contribute much to the plot's flow and, if anything, restrains the progress of the narrative linearity. This abundance of marginal passages can lead to the boredom of those new readers of Vargas Llosa, who are not necessarily familiarized with such a bonanza of historical and sociological erudition thrown into a novel.

In the course of reading any book, finding a pair of badly placed paragraphs or identifying details of mistaken time and places, are, often, powerful enough to discouraged some readers, who may decide to throw it aside. Sometimes, the opposite is true: the reader's critical eye, when noticing the incongruences of facts that he/she is familiar with, will try to find out if the writer is playing the reader a deliberate trick that, perhaps, will lead to a rational explanation when finishing reading the last page.

And at the end, if the credibility collapses, it is possible that the reader, as it happened to me with "Mischiefs of the Bad Girl", could end up unsatisfied, even if the author is considered by many, like Vargas Llosa is, one of the most prominent literary figures of the world.

The amount of historically wrong details contained in a published narrative depends on the degree of eagerness for veracity that the author wants to bring to the plot. This novel is not the exception, and here is an example:

Ricardo, the narrator and main character, affirms in Chapter III that Juan Barreto, his friend, passed away of AIDS in the early Seventies. Nevertheless, according to the history of the disease, the very first cases associated with HIV were not reported until the early Eighties, one decade after the death of this fictional character. Perhaps the author would like to associate this chronological error in this linear narrative with a not so much grave medical condition that the protagonist suffered and that is not revealed until the last pages of the novel. If that's the case, how would Vargas Llosa explain the mental acuteness he manages to give Ricardo in the multiple following passages where his brain shines with very specific dates and situations that go along with the historical realities of the more than three decades in which he moves his characters?

Nevertheless, this incredulous detail that forced me to read this chapter in disbelieved, time and time again, doesn't have to be a reason for you not to read the novel. From Chapter V on, I found passages in which the main characters assumed very elevated human characteristics and feelings, with which Vargas Llosa, perhaps a little late in the book for some of his potential readers, manages to offer the best of his creative genius, the one that most of his prolific literary production, with some exceptions, including this one, has been associated with.

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Si el escritor Mario Vargas Llosa pretendía que su novela "Travesuras de la niña mala" perdurara en la mente de los lectores, lo ha logrado por partida doble. Primero: su poder de convencimiento puede terminar desganando a quienes apenas se adentran en su gran producción literaria. Segundo: su obvio deseo de ser muy específico en el contexto histórico en que se mueven sus personajes, puede decepcionar a más de uno de los que se fijan en los detalles. Ambos, terminarán recordándola como una novela que carece de la altura creativa que se espera de este perenne candidato al Nobel de Literatura.

Los toques de realismo que intentan darle verosimilitud a esta historia, rayan en lo abrumador. La información política y social es excesiva, no parece contribuir mucho al desarrollo de la trama y hasta frena la progresión de la narrativa. Esta abundancia de pasajes marginales puede conducir al tedio a los nuevos lectores de Vargas Llosa, quienes no necesariamente están familiarizados con tanta erudición histórica y sociológica.

En el transcurso de la lectura, el tropezar con un par de párrafos mal colocados o detalles de tiempo y espacio equivocados, son, a menudo, lo suficientemente poderosos para que un lector se desanime o eche el libro a un lado. A veces, ocurre lo contrario: el ojo crítico del lector, al notar incongruencias, intentará descubrir si el escritor le está jugando una treta adrede que quizás conduzca a una explicación racional al terminar de leer la última página. Si al final esa credibilidad se derrumba, es posible que el lector, como me sucedió con "Travesuras de la niña mala", no quede del todo satisfecho, aunque el autor de la obra sea considerado por muchos como uno de los más prominentes literatos del mundo.

La cantidad de detalles históricamente incorrectos incluidos en una narrativa, depende del afán de verosimilitud que el autor quiera atribuirle a la trama. Esta novela no es una excepción. Para muestra, un botón:

Ricardo, narrador y protagonista, afirma en el capítulo III que su amigo Juan Barreto, falleció de sida a principios de los años setenta. Sin embargo, según la historia de esta enfermedad, los primeros casos asociados al VIH no fueron reportados hasta comienzos de los ochenta, una década después de la muerte de este personaje ficticio. El autor quizás quiera asociar el error cronológico en esta narrativa lineal con una condición médica de no mucha gravedad que sufre el protagonista y que se revela ya cerca del final. De ser así, entonces, ¿cómo explicaría Vargas Llosa la agudeza mental con que logra dotar a Ricardo en los múltiples pasajes siguientes donde se luce en un derroche de fechas y situaciones específicas que concuerdan con las realidades de las más de tres décadas en que mueve a sus personajes?

Sin embargo, éste detalle que me forzó su lectura una y otra vez, no debe ser razón para dejar de leer la novela. A partir del capítulo V encontramos pasajes en los que los personajes principales asumen características humanistas elevadas, con las que Vargas Llosa, quizás un poco tarde para algunos de sus lectores, logra dar muestras fehacientes del genio creativo que ha distinguido la mayor parte de sus novelas.