Way to Paradise - Softcover

Mario Vargas Llosa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 057122038X ISBN 13: 9780571220380

Publisher: Faber, 2004

Synopsis

Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. Paul, a struggling painter, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works. This double portrait is a rare study in passion and ambition. Vargas Llosa makes stunning art of their unlikely lives, chronicling their obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of adventure, illness and death.

About this title

About the Author:

With novels including The War of the End of the World, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa has established an international reputation as one of the Latin America's most important authors.

From Publishers Weekly:

Postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin's dramatic life inspired Somerset Maugham's classic The Moon and Sixpence; now Vargas Llosa takes his turn re-imagining the artist's story in an intricately detailed novel that also chronicles the life of Gauguin's feminist-socialist grandmother, Flora Trist n. Splitting the narrative between Trist n's tour of France in 1844, which she made to recruit support for her Workers Union, and Gauguin's life after landing in Tahiti in 1891, Vargas Llosa shows how each sought something-be it social reform or artistic truth-greater than themselves. The illegitimate child of a Peruvian man and a French woman, Trist n flees her villainous husband and makes her way to Peru, where she hopes to claim her inheritance from her late father's Peruvian relatives. When she fails, she returns to Europe and throws herself into radical politics. Gauguin's story is better known-the abdication of bourgeois existence for art; the brief, conflicted cohabitation with Van Gogh; the voyage to Tahiti; the sexual escapades there, and the ravages of syphilis; the final voyage to the Marquesas Islands-and Vargas Llosa tells it carefully. His twin tales achieve force and momentum through the sheer accumulation of detail and the relentlessly chronicled physical decline of both protagonists. But though usually a master of rhetoric and tone, Vargas Llosa loses his footing here, syncopating his account with second-person remarks that condescend to his characters ("Alas, Florita! It was all for the best that it hadn't happened, wasn't it?"; "[Y]ou weren't dreaming of anything so foolish, were you, Paul?"). Flora Trist n deserves to be better known, and this novel should accomplish that goal. But despite Wimmer's excellent translation, Vargas Llosa's latest too often feels like a weighty, unwieldy account of two exciting lives, which does neither its subjects nor its author's past artistry a service.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 057122038X
• ISBN 13: 9780571220380
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432