"Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llosa

    I have finished reading "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llosa few days ago. 

Interesting book... Llosa is a very dynamic writer. I enjoyed reading the book and it was definitely not boring.

    The story starts in 1950, in Peru, with young Mario, an 18 years law student that works at Panamericana radio and dreams about becoming a writer. At approximately the same time two very interesting characters appear in his life:

      -       Julia, one of his aunts, 32 years old, divorced, from Bolivia and

      -       Pedro Camacho, a Bolivian scriptwriter that is hired to write scripts for radio soap operas.

    Then the novel is split in two parts that are entangled together:

      1.     Mario’s incestuous relationship with his aunt Julia, and

      2.     Pedro Camacho’s writings.

The love story is not impressive. They fall in love and get married in secret (even if the whole family disapproves).

    But the stories written by Pedro Camacho and the Pedro Camacho character are something else.. He writes them directly from memory and is very dedicated to his work. He wins the coworkers and Mario’s respect with his attitude. The stories are brutal and dramatic following every bad habit society can give.

The episodes are interrupted by the Mario-Julia story (It feels like running and stopping to take a breath from time to time).

    I wonder if Llosa knows about programming constructors and destructors, because this is what I first though about when I realized what happened. To the end he destroys his creations:

- Pedro Camacho gets tired. His memory starts to fail him causing the different stories and characters to mix and create confusion. Eventually he is sent to a mental facility.

Mario finds Camacho after several years completely transformed. There was only a shadow left from the great man he once was.

- The Mario and Julia story ends too, after 8 years. After this he gets married to Patricia, a cousin of his. (Do you see a pattern here?)

I don’t know about you, but I always have some unanswered questions about the books I read. For this one I can think of two:

     -       Who is the “scriptwriter” Mario or Pedro Camacho? If you think the book is about Mario and Julia, then the answer might be Mario. But, if the title reflects the two characters in Mario’s life then the answer might be Pedro Camacho. Puzzling… isn’t it?

    -       How many stories does Camacho tell? I did not count them when reading. Is it a random number, or something that is important to Llosa? That I would like to know...

That’s about it. To summarize, I liked the book. Here is a nice interview with Mario Vargas Llosa about "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter":

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/133_wbc_archive_new/page4.shtml

PS: I already started reading “The War of the End of the World” also by Mario Vargas Llosa, and I plan to read “Conversation in the Cathedral”, in order to have a better understanding of Llosa’s work.

Thank you Mihaela for the suggestions!