Synopsis
Set in Lima, this story of a love triangle introduces Don Rigoberto, a gray insurance executive by day and a pornographer by night, his second wife, Lucrecia, and his son, Alfonso, who has relations with his stepmother, Lucrecia. 75,000 first printing.
Reviews
Vargas Llosa's most enjoyable novel since his Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982)with which it shares the motif, used elsewhere in his fiction, of a teenager's romantic fixation on his beautiful stepmother. The storys set in Lima, where middle-aged insurance executive Don Rigoberto's happy marriage to his luscious young second wife Lucrecia (amusingly pet-named ``Lucre'') has been temporarily rocked by Lucrecia's indiscretion with her handsome stepson Alfonso (``Fonchito''), a politely deferential ``little pagan god'' whose ingenuous questions about male-female interrelationships arouse the distraught Lucrecia beyond boiling point. Simultaneously, Don Rigoberto fills his ``notebooks'' with impassioned sexual arcana and fantasizing: arguments with a militant ``feminist sect''; ``diatribes'' against ``Rotarians,'' who repress sexual energies, and ``Sportsmen,'' who misspend them; and the like. The line between reality and invention is repeatedly blurred, as Vargas Llosa juxtaposes such entries with accounts of Lucrecia's efforts to resist Fonchito and of her previous a submissions to Don Rigoberto's erotic importunings (persuading her, for example, to ``enact'' the subjects of famous infamous paintings, and--in a dazzling illustration of what a great writer can do with an extended dirty joke--to undertake, then describe a ``chaste'' vacation enjoyed with a former lover). If the Marquis de Sade had had a sense of humor, he might have anticipated such delights as this novel's urbane fetishism (``A Tiny Foot''), appreciations of love in unexpected places (a ``formidable sexual encounter'' between mating spiders), and uproarious deadpan dialogue (``I went off last night.''/''Where to, stepmama ?).. It's all so outrageously entertaining that one must concentrate scrupulously to notice how brilliantly Vargas Llosa uses Don Rigoberto's notebooks to comment on a daunting variety of general cultural as well as sexual topics. An Anatomy of Eros unlike any other fiction. Its author may need a cold shower; all the fortunate reader needs is the time and place (preferably bed) to sample its very considerable pleasures. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Since Freud, we've all been aware of the relationship between creativity and procreativity, but few writers have explored the link in such luminous, celebratory detail. Don Rigoberto may or may not be encouraging his estranged wife to engage in lusciously described sex?it could all be inventions in his notebook?and the estrangement may or may not result from a sexual encounter between Do?a Lucrecia and her husband's prepubescent son, but it hardly matters. What matters is the extraordinary language and the way Vargas Llosa makes readers rethink love, sex, and imagination.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Deliciously challenging, delightfully lurid, the latest novel by the famous Peruvian writer tempts the reader into the world of a married couple from Lima, the successful Don Rigoberto and his second wife, Lucrecia. Husband and wife, as the story opens, are separated; a sexual interlude took place between Don Rigoberto's young son and Lucrecia, and for allowing it to happen, Lucrecia had to move out of the house to live on her own, by her husband's demand. Rigoberto has a vivid imagination, and in his wife's absence--to keep loneliness at bay because of her absence--he inscribes in notebooks, by night, his remembrances and fantasies and wishes vis-a-vis her sexual abilities. His young son, at the same time, visits Lucrecia regularly to attempt a reconciliation between father and stepmother. What is real about this couple's lives and what is simply embroidery by Don Rigoberto in his notebooks? Vargas Llosa makes certain the reader is not always certain. This is not a novel of great narrative drive; its strengths are its lush language and suitably languid tone in depicting the satisfaction of sexual congress. Brad Hooper
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