Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

An exciting and fascinating story, I loved the way Vargas Llosa waves the story of his writing the story of his friend Mayra weaved into experiences of various actors from the drama. More compact and easier to follow than The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, Alejandro Mayta also mixes tenses and speakers in the same paragraph in a beautiful mosaic despite the despair and violence that the story recounts. I don't understand why this book does not have more notoriety because it is well-written, engaging and heart-breaking.

The other thing I noticed is that, as MVL talked about in The Perpetual Orgy, there is no judgement on the part of the first person narrator (the stand-in for MVL himself). It is also a terrifying account of Peru over a period of 25 years with escalating violence. Knowing people from Peru, his descriptions of the city in the present time in the book as being beset and besieged by mountains of trash are all accurate. Apparently, there was even a literal mountain of trash inside which - like The Green House or Panteleon - there were sordid brothel-hotels.
A fantastic read!

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)