Imagine that the love of your life is bad to the bone. Picture yourself under the spell of a genius of deception and craftiness, but one who also possesses beauty and charm and a larger-than-life presence. You know that you are a fool, but you find yourself unable to resist the allure of your tormentor.
The hero of Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, The Bad Girl, finds himself in just such a predicament. During the summer of 1950, a Peruvian teenager falls in love with a young Chilean girl who has moved to his neighborhood. Ricardo Somocurcio is captivated by the new arrival’s haughty attitudes, her risqué dancing, and her charming foreign accent. Little does he know that he has met the “bad girl.” For the next four decades, she will periodically enter his life, wreak havoc with everything he holds dear, and then vanish – until her next inevitable reappearance.
There are many famous bad girls in literary history -- from Helen of Troy to Lolita -- but Vargas Llosa’s heroine raises her manipulative games to such a high level that they almost become a type of performance art. “The truth was,” Ricardo muses, “there was something in her impossible not to admire, for the reasons that lead us to appreciate well-made works even when they’re perverse.” The Chilean girl, as it turns out, is not even from Chile – this was just a ruse and tall tale to give her notoriety in a new neighborhood. Even the foreign accent is a sham. At other times in the novel, she reappears as Comrade Arlette the Cuban revolutionary, Madame Arnoux the diplomat’s wife, Kuriko the Japanese smuggler, and in other guises and identities.
But she always returns to Ricardo – sometimes merely to tease or taunt him, other times to play the part of a model companion. But the bad girl can never be content for long with the ho-hum existence of a homemaker. She longs for wealth, power and intrigue. The moment a more exciting alternative comes along, she is quick to abandon her devoted lover.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
2 - moonraven
I read this latest effort by Varga Llosa in Spanish when it first came out.
He still has the precise positioning of prose as always, but as he gets older there is less and less substance to what he writes.
(I have to wonder if there is a relationship with his political posture--as he started out on the left with interest in and energy for social justice issues and gradually has shifted rightward to the point that his current political stance is further right than the dictator he lost his big to be president of Peru to, Fujimori.)
Hardening of the creative arteries has clearly set in for this writer right along with hardening of the poltical arteries. La niña traviesa is trivial and tedious, and his previous novel, El paraiso en la otra esquina, which attempted to show two parallel lives: those of Flora Tristan, 19th century revolutionary and her grandson, painter Paul Gaugin was an abject failure which managed to take two extremely interesting people and beat them into boredom itself.
Too bad. He used to be a terrific writer, but his last book that was not a fatuous snoozer was La fiesta del chivo--the fictionalized last days in power of Trujillo, longterm dictator of the Dominican Republic.
Unfortunately, Gabriel Garcia Marquez beat him to the punch on that topic years earlier with the outrageous Otoño del patriarca.
Since the only thing even worth opening the books for is his use of language, I cannot imagine reading Vargas Llosa in translation!
3 - heatseekers
Sounds like fun. Loved his early book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which had me rollin in the aisles way back in the 1980s - a story of a lad with a fancy for his sexy older cousin, interspersed with the increasingly leaky episodes from five radio soaps written by his workaholic colleague.
4 - moonraven
That was back in the day when the guy could still WRITE.
The only point he appears to TRY to make in the new books is that somewhere along the line he was introduced--VERY RELUCTANTLY--to cunnilingus.