Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia went out every day to have lunch or tea with one or another of her many suitors, but she saved her evenings for me. We spent them at the movies, as a matter of fact, sitting in one of the very last rows at the back, where (especially if it was a terrible film) we could kiss without bothering the other spectators and without running the risk of somebody recognizing us. Our relationship had soon stabilized at some amorphous stage; it was situated at some indefinable point between the opposed categories of being sweethearts and being lovers. This was a subject that cropped up  constantly in our conversations. We shared certain of the classic traits of lovers--secretiveness, the shared fear of being discovered, the feeling that we were taking great risks--but we were lovers spiritually, not materially, because we didn't make love (and, as Javier was later shocked to learn, we didn't even "feel each other up").

Mario, the narrator of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, falls in love with his Aunt Julia, and I am obligated before going any further to point out that Julia is his aunt by marriage, recently divorced, so we're not talking about incest. The pair are driven together by the little-r romantic force of mutual admiration, though Mario is eighteen years old and Julia an old maid at the hideous age of thirty-two. (Vargas Llosa really did marry his aunt-by-marriage when he was nineteen and she was twenty-nine.) Their relationship is kept, of course, a secret, because they know that it will cause a furor among their family if anyone finds out. At the same time, the radio station where Mario works hires an accomplished writer of serial programs who brings the station a newfound popularity. Like Julia, who is a devotee of the programs, he is Bolivian (the relationship between the various countries of South America is one of the topics at hand here, as the scriptwriter gets in trouble over and over for sneaking in various insults to Argentines into his work).

Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter, is the novel's high point: a tiny man who writes without ceasing nearly every minute of the day. He's monomaniacal, difficult to work with, and yet Mario admires him somewhat because he has what Mario wants: accomplishment as a writer. One day, stopping at Pedro's apartment, Mario is shown a box of costumes and wigs that Pedro uses in secret to meterse en papel, get himself into paper--a fun Spanish term I just learned that means to "get into character." But what is most interesting about the novel is that chapters about the "real story" are interleaved with stories that are clearly taken from Pedro's radio serials, gruesome stories of incest, rape, and murder that have captured the attention of Lima. These serials are half the book, and so the novel is in some ways also a collection of short stories. Many of these are fascinatingly disturbing: the serial about the doctor who discovers the incestuous relationship between two siblings on the sister's wedding day, or the one about the Jehovah's Witness accused of rape who threatens to cut off his genitals to absolve himself of a rape. In true radio serial fashion, these stories tend to end on a "tune in next time" cliffhanger.

But the pace of the work is too much even for Pedro, who begins to lose it, mixing up the various characters in his serials. Suddenly, a character who was killed in another serial comes back again in a new one, transformed into a doctor or a priest, or a character who has been named Lituma has suddenly borrowed the name of Quinteros. The effect is that the stories begin to bleed together into one. They become increasingly violent, not just on the scale of pulp, but on the scale of disaster: huge fires, collapsing football stadiums, that murder off characters by the dozen just for them to be put through the ringer in next week's episode. It's funny, the story of Mario and Julia unfolds very staidly and straightforwardly next to the serials. Is their romance like the romances of fiction? Or is it perhaps not complicated enough? Whatever else is true, there's a suggestion that Mario's devotion to Julia above all else is a sign that he'll never be able to reproduce the passion of Pedro, who cares about nothing else beside his art, and that's both a good and bad thing.

With the addition of Peru, my "Countries Read" list is up to 113! Additionally, with the addition of Vargas Llosa, I've now read 57 of 128 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates.