Customer Reviews

The Way to Paradise

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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.

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.

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.

I had waited to read this book since hearing about it. I was not disappointed. Vargas Llosa is most masterful in describing the life of Flora Tristan, the little known early 19th century century women's and worker's rights activits. I hope this book will help renew interest in this fascinating woman. While the prose style of moving back and forth between Tristan and her grandson the painter Gauguin may appear difficult at first, it is materful in execution. Vargas Llosa has a brilliant manner in covering time, allowing for flashbacks to many important events in his main characters lives. Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin each found "The Way to Paradise" in a unique way. I felt much more sympathy for Tristan, who faced numerous injustices and fought for a cause. Gauguin, while a brilliant artist, comes across as a bit crazed at the end. One does leave this work wondering more about Flora's daughter (and Gauguin's mother) Aline -- the one interconnecting person between these two. Reviews have not highlighted the fact that Vargas Llosa, who was born in Arequipa, Peru, is, as I understand, a descendant of one of Flora's Tristan uncles, though not the Uncle Pio, who played a crucial role in disinheriting Flora. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the personalities of these fascinating individuals. However, it is written as fiction, and I felt fortunate to have previously read portions of David Sweetman's brilliant biography "Paul Gauguin, A Complete Life", since it presented a factual context for both Flora and Gauguin's lives.

You probably already read some of the previous (great) reviews. I do agree with most of what was written so I will not be repeating that information. But I do give you a tip; buy, or borrow a book of Paul Gauguin's art, and read this novel watching the paintings. Then you will realize the great descriptions Mr. Llosa gives of the paintings and their meaning. It's Stunning.

As for the second person references, it isn't that anoying, although at the end they are a little too common; but somehow they give you a link with Flora and Paul, maybe an empathic link.

The characters are very well researched, realistic, with lots of flaws (like everyone) and hopes, past mistakes, glorious victories... but with one common goal - the search for paradise.

I rarely read novels more than once. There are some I have read several times, but the list might just run to double figures. I have read The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa twice, but not for the usual reasons. First time though I was so disappointed with the book that I thought I had to be mistaken. So I waited a few months and read it again. Second time through I enjoyed it much more but, on finishing it, I had many of the same reservations as I did first time round.

The Way To Paradise juxtaposes two stories which, in essence, deal with how people pursue ideals. It identifies the inevitable selfishness associated with a person's obsession to achieve, how pragmatism and compromise inevitably dictate daily routine, and how fate, unpredictable and unyielding, has the ultimate say on all of our endeavours.

The two stories of The Way To Paradise are related by family. One describes how the French painter, Paul Gaugin, left his job as a mildly successful stockbroker to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. A closet painter while he acted out the humdrum of nine to five to provide for his thoroughly and properly domesticated Danish wife and five children, Paul Gaugin drooled over canvases by impressionist painters such as Manet. The latter's nude depiction of Olympia played a significant role in crystallising Gaugin's ambitions. A provocative and highly erotic painting it is, for sure. What Gaugin did not know, it seems, was that the sitter shared the name of his grandmother's lesbian lover. It would add poignancy to the story if the painting's subject was actually the grandmother's lover, but the decades don't add up.

Flora Tristan, Paul Gaugin's grandma, was born into potential wealth. But she was illegitimate, her wealthy Peruvian father having sired her via a poor French mother. So she grew up in poverty. She marries. She hates sex, abhorring everything to do with the act, so the marriage to an impatient husband does not last. There is a child, but there is also violence, threats, public scenes and estrangement. Flora takes up the struggle for women's rights, workers' rights and socialism. She dresses as a man to research the experience of prostitutes. She travels from town to town giving presentations and speeches to guilds, assemblies of the poor and groups of women.

Both Paul Gaugin and Flora Tristan travel. The artist, of course, as we all know, went to live on various Pacific islands, where he painted most of the works that now make him famous. But at the time, the experience was far from idyllic. Having wanted to escape the constricting conventions and conservatism of France, he found it reincarnated in the officialdom that dealt with him, his poverty, and his illness, syphilis, which rendered him smelly, pussy and unsightly. On can only imagine what his grandmother would have thought of his processing of local women, whom he painted, infected, made pregnant and then deserted, sometimes in that order. The grandson was doing what the grandmother would have despised, derided. But then the women on the receiving end weren't Europeans, were they?

Flora travelled to Peru in an attempt to claim the inheritance of her birthright. In South America, with colonial heritage all around, she brushed shoulders with the rich, with a way of life she could only dream about in Europe. The experience galvanised her, created the resolution to seek change, a resolve that drove her through her remaining years, prompted her to write, to seek self-expression that might widen and convince her audience.

And so both grandmother and grandson pursue their own ideals, never consciously attaining them, of course, but the pursuit, like the life that bears it, is the point. The process is the end, the product merely existence.

In reviewing The Way To Paradise I find I have taken much more from the book than I thought. I had problems with the style in that its unidentified narrator constantly seemed to address Flora and Paul directly, referred to them as `you', almost implying that they were acquaintances. On reflection, that might be part of the book's point, in that celebrity renders those who possess it the friends of anyone. Both characters are thus part of our own common history. We already know them as Paul and Flora. In the case of Paul Gaugin, however, we meet a much lauded, selfish, self-obsessed, perhaps, painter whom everyone recognises. In Flora Tristan, Mario Vargas Llosa tells us, we have a member of the same family who ought to be known better than she is. In contrast with her grandson, however, her selflessness, her energy, her purity, paradoxically, identify her as a figure worthy of respect, worthy of history. The Way To Paradise was clearly worth its second read.

A book in the genre of "Agony and Ecstasy" and "Lust for Life", this part-fact and part-fiction story (or novel?) is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin and that of his grandmother Flora Tristan.

The book's chapters alternate between the lives of Gaugin and Tristan trying to draw a common thread between their seemingly uncommon lives.

Though Gauguin is obviously better known of the 2 characters, Llosa's novel does well to bring to light the life and work of his illustrious socialist grandmother who devoted her life to the upliftment of the women.

Each of the two central characters (adventurers in their own sense) are searching for paradise - the grandmother by trying to change the world and the grandson by escaping from his world. The question the reader is forced to ask is "Did both of them discover their respective paradises?"

An extremely fast and engrossing read though it took me three chapters to figure out the writers style of writing (referring to the characters in second person) and his oscillation between the events in the lives of the two protagonists. As always, I am sure the original untranslated version made a better read than the translated-into-English version.

Excellent book, following the narrative style of "La fiesta del Chivo" but with a totally different topic, Vargas Llosa beautifully describes the thoughts and lives of two completely different minds but equally strong personalities (must be in their blood, as they are related): the painter Gauguin and his feminist/socialist grandmother Flora Tristan. And, if you like art, I think that Vargas Llosa makes a wonderful job describing the thoughts that originate some of Gauguin's paintings... it is just sublime. Highly recommended.

I am great fan of Vargas Llosa, having read all his novels. While others have criticized his style, I find it works exceptionally well in this particular novel. The non-linearity of each of the protagonist's stories adds to a much fuller understanding of Koke and Flora. You appreciate each more after learning what choices they made to become who they are, when you already know them in their "prime". Unlike many other reviewers, I found Vargas Llosa's style of interjecting comments by the protagonists added an itimacy and immediacy to the stories.
And now to do my own research on Flora and Paul....
For any of you who have not read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, it is perhaps his best and most enjoyable novel. Feast of the Goat also a great read. Though my personal favorite is The War at the End of the World, another historical novel, though about much more arcane subject.

Wonderful wonderful book. Vargas is the master of story telling. He is in the same league as thelatin American greats like Borges, Garcia Marquez. He marvellously constructs a story, shuttling between two time periods. His character of gaugin is tragic at the same time funny. I will read all that Vargas has written. I highly recommend this book as I do every other work of Vargas