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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A false paradise, August 6, 2004
At first glance, The Way To Paradise is a classic example of Mario Vargas Llosa's style: interesting and unusual characters, colorful settings, poetic prose. The book even uses Mr. Vargas Llosa's preferred device of switching between narratives in alternating chapters as he did with such great success in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The Feast of the Goat, among others.
But in the end, I think, the story falls well short of those other two wonderful books, for a variety of reasons that left me puzzled.
First, I'll add my name to the chorus of reviewers who were left confused by Mr. Vargas Llosa's decision to pepper his narrative with second-hand comments from the book's two main characters (especially with Flora Tristán, who seems to ask herself at least once every page something like "but you could not have known that, could you, Flora?").
More importantly, the style of alternating chapters between the story of Ms. Tristán, a 19th century social reformer, and her grandson Paul Gauguin, the painter, doesn't work nearly as well here as it does elsewhere. That is mostly because the two stories have very little to do with each other. Ms. Tristán and Mr. Gauguin were related -- though they never met each other -- but aside from a few passing and insignificant comments by Mr. Gauguin about his grandmother, one story line never crossed. Are you interested in the story of Ms. Tristán's epic battle to mobilize workers in France in the 1840s? Then read the odd-numbered chapters. Do you prefer the story of the famous painter of Tahiti and Tahitians around the turn of the 20th Century? Then skip the odd and read only the even-numbered installments.
The one common thread between the two narratives is hinted at in the title: in their own way, both Ms. Tristán and Mr. Gauguin spend their lives trying to reach a certain kind of paradise. In the case of the former, it's through trying to create a kind of workers' paradise in which women and laborers are protagonists. In the case of the latter, it is through fleeing the closed art world of Paris in the 1880s for the paradise of Tahiti, where Mr. Gauguin felt the savage and pure soul of mankind was still bare to see. But in the end, all both characters find is frustration and, of course, death.
Days after finishing the book, it is both characters' deaths that stick with me the most. Mr. Vargas Llosa describes their physical declines with horrible consistency. The biting and consuming gut pains that crippled Ms. Tristán upset my own stomach. And the periodic descriptions of the insects attracted to the foul-smelling puss dripping from Mr. Gauguin's syphilis sores more than once left a bitter scowl on my face.
Mr. Vargas Llosa does deserve kudos for the way he brings two distant and distinct historical characters to life, his second consecutive historical novel in which mounds of research make the actual history seem at once central and effortless. If you are a fan of Mr. Vargas Llosa's work, you'll no doubt find plenty to enjoy in The Way To Paradise. But to everyone else, I'd recommend one of the author's real top-shelf efforts. There are plenty to pick from.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Struggle to Paradise, November 6, 2003
If Mario Vargas Llosa had not lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in the late 1980s and had become president of Peru, it's interesting to imagine how that country would be faring today. What we do know is that the literary world would have missed this writer of intelligent, politically-influenced fiction. With "Feast of the Goat" and now with "The Way to Paradise," Vargas Llosa turns his astute gaze to Europe and the Pacific, and demonstrates that he can write masterfully about cultures and countries other than his own. In the new book he traces the life of painter Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, the socialist feminist Flora Tristan. Set in France and the South Pacific with a brief sojourn in Peru, he charts the courses of two related people who never knew each other, and whose lives were similar in that they found the conventions of their times impossible to live with. Flora Tristan grew up in poverty as the illegitimate daughter of a French mother and a Peruvian father. Her marriage was abusive and she escaped her husband to reinvent herself as a popular writer and campaigner for workers' rights. Despite failing health, she tours the small towns of France recruiting members for her Workers' Union. Her grandson Paul abandons his large family and friendship with other painters to escape to Tahiti to paint. Riddled with syphilis, his health is failing as well. Natasha Wimmer's translation is excellent. There are scenes that glow with the golden light of Arles or sting with the scent of the sea. Where "Paradise" misses the mark is through an irritating literary device where rhetorical questions or comments are made of the characters in the second person: "Was it because of the woman in Panama that your vision was weakened, your heart was failing, and your legs were covered with pustules?" or: "You would later remember those two hours of absurd debate, Florita." You get the idea. It adds nothing to the narrative and is a jarringly false step from such a sure-footed writer.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Tale of Two Impossible Paradises, July 4, 2004
Where Vargas Llosa simply shines, again, is in the very telling of these lives, his writing continues to mature becoming so much its own and, at the same time, achieving such transparence that the reader is left to be with the novel's characters, Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristan, without an overwhelming author's voice to guide her or him -something that even great writers could find so easy to indulge in. Whether biographical accuracy is respected or not, it is truly irrelevant. This is a novel, and it is free to ponder on more important things than that. This is the story of human beings, almost a century apart, facing their own forms of finding paradise, perhaps the kind of paradise that Arthur Rimbaud called "Christmas on earth," if not bliss, a certain peace that can only come after giving yourself over to the vision where desire may reign without stifling moral constrains or the vision of a society where its moral principle is justice. Flora and Paul, in their own circumstances, are devoted to seeing the glory of their visions which they long for, and suffer from, all their lives. For Flora it's the restless fight for having women finally considered peers to men. Her body agonizing exhausted with the little progress that her words can manage even among leaders of Utopian groups. For Gauguin it is painting nothing less than epiphany after epiphany, following a God who created and blesses the most essential ways of life. For him, this is what he travels to the Pacific Islands for. He's a Christian longing to be a "savage" -this is longing that has become his form of agony. It is interesting that both bodies suffer greatly from what their souls pursue. Also, one can conclude that, if these two ever met they would likely be at odds with each other, fail to see anything but an enemy before them. These are not people to be liked or cherished necessarily, specially Gauguin, yet they are to be understood for the genuine tenor of their passions, loved enough to have them teach you their own truths. Vargas Llosa, like Coetzee or Kundera, continues to deepen his craft and chance his reputation to pushing the boundaries of contemporary fiction, so willing these days to hail formulas. This alone, is remarkable. Please, read this novel and be enriched by Flora Tristan, by Paul Gauguin, and even more profoundly, by Mario Vargas Llosa.
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