Mario Vargas Llosa has created another world in which the reader can inhabit over time in his 1977 novel, Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter. I imagine that much of the story is autobiographical. It is about a young man, Marito, who is inspired to become a writer, but must toil away at a law degree to please his parents while working part time as a radio journalist for the local news radio station. Two Bolivians come into his life in Lima and change the course of his life, the scriptwriter Pedro Camacho and his recently divorced Aunt Julia. Pedro Camacho becomes a Peruvian sensation with his antics as a one man scriptwriting machine, simultaneously producing several wildly popular radio programs that are recounted in the odd chapters of Llosa's novel. These stories often have fantastic elements or tall tales and always end as a cliffhanger and that simultaneously got more and more dark, until Camacho has killed off all of his characters. And then he is finally taken away to a mental hospital for exhaustion. However, he had become a sort of friend and mentor to the young Marito along the way. Marito catalogs his many eccentricities, which includes an untold hatred for Argentinians-which is later revealed to stem from his unstable marriage to a wayward Argentine woman. Aunt Julia disrupts his life by becoming his first true love and muse despite a 14 year age gap. I wonder if she is to stand for a metaphor for standing up for what your true love is and having the power to follow through with it despite parental objection. From what I understand Llosa's father thought that a life in letters was unmanly and undignified. So for Llosa, writing was a dissident activity. This also reads as a nostalgic love letter to a time and place that no longer exists and I enjoyed inhabiting the Lima of what I guessed to be the 50s.
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I really enjoyed the film version as well. Peter Falk is hilarious, and Barbara Hershey is, well, pretty hot.
Posted by: Ted | November 29, 2012 at 08:40 AM
Is that "Tune in Tomorrow"?
Posted by: MC | November 29, 2012 at 01:31 PM
That's right.
Posted by: Ted | November 30, 2012 at 10:32 AM