Language | English |
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ISBN-10 | 0571239331 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-571-23933-7 |
No of pages | 276 |
Font Size | Medium |
Book Publisher | Faber And Faber |
Published Date | 08 Nov 2007 |
Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years.
His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town that brings together the innocent and the corrupt;
The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo’s insidious regime; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,
a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucmo.
He is also a widely read and respected essayist, writing everything from newspaper opinion pieces to critical works on other writers, including The Perpetual Orgy on Flaubert.
Vargas Lola is also active outside the literary arena, and was a serious contender for the presidency of Peru in 1990 (eventually losing to the now disgraced Alberto Fujimori), an experience he documented in his memoir, A Fish in the Water.
On the controversial nature of some of his work he said, “The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have.
I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate.
I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life. “He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2010, "for his cartography of structures of power & his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
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Ricardo Homocercal is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist end route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an city, remote one who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by.
Whoever the bad girl turns up as - whether it's Madame Robert Anoud, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuroki, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse - does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In Mario Vargas Lola’s beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.