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Another wonderful and perceptive piece of historical fiction from MVL, this time about the French painter Paul Gaugin and his grandmother Flora Tristán. I had no idea that Gaugin was part-Peruvian and what a tragic but interesting life she led. The book is divided (as many of MVL's books including his autobiography) with alternate chapters dealing with Flora's life during her last few months and Paul/Koké's life towards the end of his life in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. The writing is - as always with MVL - judgement free and has fluid barriers between the present of the narrative and the past of the protagonist as they rummage through their memories. The narrator in both cases talks to Flora (sometimes as Florita or as Andalusa) and to Paul (or his Tahitian name Koké) as a friend or an intimate but never with judgement over their actions, just a wistful recollection of their successes and failures. I gained a profound new appreciation for Gaugin's work (although I am even more repelled by his pedophilia and his ego-centrism) and learned so much about his life and the colonial system in the French Pacific colonies (not unlike that which MvL described about Congo and Peru in Dream of the Celt or Brazil in The War at the End of the World). As for Flora, she was a badass to whom life was really a total shit-sandwich. That being said, the description of her trip to Arequipa and the civil war she witnessed were extraordinary prose.
Once again, MVL writes a compelling novel which talks about exploitation and oppression of natives and especially women in no uncertain terms and the result is readable and thought-provoking. Another awesome book by MVL.
This is one I will probably reread in English translation as this particular one I read in French.

Fino's Mario Vargas Llosa Reviews:
Fiction
The Cubs and Other Stories (1959) TBR
The Time of the Hero (1963)
The Green House (1966)
Conversation in the Cathedral (1969)
Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1973)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)
The War of the End of the World (1981)
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1985)
Who Killed Palomino Molero? (1987)
The Storyteller (1989)
In Praise of the Stepmother (1990)
Death in the Andes (1996)
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998)
The Feast of the Goat (2001)
The Way to Paradise (2003)
The Bad Girl (2007)
The Dream of the Celt (2010)
The Discrete Hero (2015)
The Neighborhood (2018)
Harsh Times (2021) TBR

Non-Fiction
The Perpetual Orgy (1975)
A Fish Out of Water (1993)
Letters to a Young Novelist (1998)