Mario grows artistically disturbed, for during Camacho's hegemony over the Peruvian airwaves, Mario is writing unpublishable stories, following the sacrosanct literary trail left by the classic writers, and he wonders:

urn:lcp:auntjuliascriptw0000varg_x4s7:epub:4568f36a-0e97-4395-9ac3-f64ce4d82139 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier auntjuliascriptw0000varg_x4s7 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t4dp46q5b Invoice 1652 Isbn 0571203779Mario Vargas Llosa tells us: "With Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter my idea was to write a novel with stereotypes, with clichés, with all the instruments of the popular novel, the soap opera, and the radio serial, but in such a way that these elements could be transformed into an artistic work, into something personal and original.” Il risultato è un romanzo divertente, fresco, tenero, strano, fantasioso, colorato. Che però non si limita a divertire, ma pare anche farsi domande sull'arte stessa del romanzo. Mario vorrebbe scrivere, ma ci riesce solo quando inizia a vivere e a godere la sua vita; lo scribacchino invece, completamente immerso solo nella scrittura, perde progressivamente il lume della ragione e fa una miseranda fine.

He has lately become a television talk-show host in Lima as well, and ''Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,'' originally published in Barcelona in 1977, has been made into what his publishers say is a ''top-rated television Lccn 82005159 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Openlibrary_edition The hero(the protagonist) of Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter is a young aspiring writer. As the title indicates, there is a certain aunt Julia. Our eighteen year old protagonist falls in love with his aunt Julia. They are not really related, but there is an age difference to consider. At the same time, the novel follows the fate of a famous radio soap opera writer. The book is divided into chapters devoted to episodes of popular soap operas that are then followed by chapters describing the life of our protagonist. The two merge together perfectly. I quite enjoyed the bit of intertexuality that is present in this novel. Its pacing reminds me a bit of Rossini’s William Tell Overture – starts off quietly, the race begins, the crashing storm and then peace reigns as everything settles down. Llosa, as a young radio newsman in Lima in 1953, worked with a singular Bolivian named Raul Salmon, and he has said that he based his fictional scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, on Salmon.

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 Lucho. As I read I was perplexed by the two-dimensional clichés perfectly embodied in their exaggerated and flawless character traits. It was as though Jeffrey Archer's ghost had got into Llosa’s bloodstream. Is that the best you could do, Mr. Llosa? Come on!. My hunch that I were missing something turned out to be right. It was in the middle of the third story I realised what was happening: Pedro Camacho hadn’t made appearance by that time, but his electrifying radio serials were reproduced verbatim with all their pulpy gloss, alternated by the second narrative stream that concerns the narrator Marito’s account of his love affair with Aunt Julia. The novel came truly to life in the second half when Camacho’s stories took on the comical effect. The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Crowds line up to see him at work through the window of a tiny cubicle. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane. He mixes up his radio characters from one saga to another. People die in a fire and re-appear in the next episode. The doctor in one episode becomes a judge the next day in another. The story is set in the Lima of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. The fictional characters do not need this authentication, but the matter deserves at least a mention since the roman a clef element has generated talk of Vargas Llosa's indiscretion. Also, it is nifty gossip for Vargas Llosa fans, whose numbers are

Mario Vargas Llosa parte da uno spunto autobiografico (la storia del suo primo matrimonio con una parente acquisita molto più grande di lui) per raccontare due grandi passioni del continente più passionale del mondo: l'amore e la letteratura. In alternating chapters the book interweaves the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, so it’s also like a collection of short stories. We are also treated to the plots of a few short stories written by the aspiring author. row of the movies so they can kiss and coo. They eventually get on to some serious improprieties, but only when marriage is imminent, and what they do then is rather chastely told. Llosa apparently liked the film that was based on the book, but I would rather visualise it in Peru where the author set it, rather than in the US where the film is set.

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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.” Mi aspettavo in continuazione che da un momento all'altro potesse succedere qualcosa che alla fine non succede.....e proprio il finale m'ha lasciato un po' l'amaro in bocca, per il modo in cui la storia di Pedro Camacho si conclude, perché oggettivamente era lui il personaggio da cui mi aspettavo quel qualcosa in più, ma Vargas Llosa non è stato della mia stessa idea. Mario's bosses also run Panamericana's sister station, which broadcasts novelas (short-run soap operas). They are having problems buying the serials in bulk from Cuba, with batches of scripts being ruined and quality being poor, and so they hire an eccentric Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. Ariel Texidó, Luz Nicolás, Kika Child, and Pablo Andrade in ‘Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.’ Photo by Daniel Martinez.