Vargas Llosa is fascinated by this dysfunctional relationship, and probes it in all its glory and unseemliness. Our moral systems prize forgiveness, and praise the wronged party who “turns the other cheek.” Yet we are also taught to despise a loser like Ricardo who lets his beloved walk all over him. But Vargas Llosa understands that these ethical and religious considerations are overwhelmed by the magnetic attraction between those who want to domineer and others who find joy in abject submission. He adds to the subtlety of his exposition by creating a sub-plot in which the bad girl falls under the sway of a domineering criminal who manipulates her in exactly the same manner as she does Ricardo.
Above all, Vargas Llosa is a great storyteller. His tale unfolds in a series of taut interludes which move over the course of a half dozen countries on three continents. And though he never loses sight of his main plot, he takes time to build fascinating side stories. We follow the dark side of Tokyo nightlife, or meet a Peruvian mystic who seems to be able to converse with the powers of the sea, or follow the self-discovery of a mute boy who learns to speak several languages.
As we have seen in so many of Vargas Llosa’s other novels, this author has an endless fascination with the complexities and quirks of ordinary people. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that for this novelist, there are no ordinary people, but each individual possesses hidden resources that await the right occasion before they come into play. The Bad Girl continues in this tradition, and offers us a heroine who will rank among Vargas Llosa’s most memorable creations.
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.