Set in Lima, Peru this is the story of a bizarre love triangle whose participants may be the creations of Don Rigoberto's fertile imagination. The central characters are Rigoberto himself, a dull insurance executive by day, a pornogapher and sexual enthusiast by night; Lucrecia, his second wife; and Alfonso, his angel-faced young son. Husband and wife have been separated for a year because of a sexual encounter between the boy and his stepmother. Rigoberto misses Lucrecia desperately--filling notebooks with his memories, fantasies, and letters he will never send. Meanwhile, Alfonso visits Lucrecia, attempting to both win her love and reunite her with his father. A companion volume to In Praise of the Stepmother--where we were first introduced to these passionate characters--The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is a compelling mix of fantasy and reality that always keep the reader guessing.
In Elogio de la Madrasta ("In Praise of the Stepmother"), Vargas Llosa took up the erotic novel, introducing the sensual stepmother Do?a Lucrecia and her husband, Don Rigoberto. This is the second part of Elogio. Each night, in order to keep his marriage to Lucrecia from becoming stale, Don Rigoberto conjures erotic fantasies. These musings, which he writes down in his notebooks, transport him in space and time, allowing him to explore subjects ranging from politics to the arts in an eloquent display of language. Vargas Llosa is at the top of his craft, deftly combining wit and style in a work that will delight and captivate readers.?Jorge Gonzalez Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Language Notes
Text: Spanish
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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.
This review is from: Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (Paperback)
este libro es bien entretenido y picaro y para mi muestra al hombre del nuevo milenio, un hombre normal, que da rienda suelta a sus fantasias y que esta dispuesto a dejar quie su esposa las comparta, es muy entretenido ya que el autor no deja caer el tono y el libro se mantiene a traves de sus trescientas paginas. muy recomendado. Luis Mendez
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This review is from: Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (Paperback)
Vargas LLosa no pierde el ritmo literario, au'n en su u'ltima novela. En argumento, al principio pareciera no tener nada destellante, sin embargo conforme iba leyendo, me gusto' la trama que se desencadena al final, ciertas li'neas pi'caras y el lenguaje de un gran escritor. Una novela para buenos lectores y amantes de la literatura.
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que libro dios mio. las cartas que este senor escribe a su senora son las mas romanticas que he leido, o las mas enfermas. Pero de todas maneras, yo disfrute el libro
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