Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuing with my series of old reviews of Mario Vargas Llosa books in the wake of his demise recently; this time one of my favorites from his pen. Once again, this is an old review which I am finally posting here.


The fiction of Mario Vargas Llosa, by now one of my favorite authors, that I have read till now mostly focused on grim events and episodes in human history, with some remarkably astute storytelling around events which occurred, at least in part, in real life. But one of his most famous novels was supposed to be a comic romp, again based on historical incidents (though in this case his own), about a young reporter’s love affair and subsequent marriage with his aunt (not related by blood) who was 32 when the protagonist was 18.

The book is ‘Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter’ and it was one of several of his works which I bought in a fit of Llosa frenzy more than a decade ago when I was enthralled by some of the initial novels of his which I had read. As has always been my habit of not usually finishing off an author’s entire backlog in one go, so it has taken me a while to get around to this. And it really is one worthy of being put alongside some of his most prominent works.

The story opens in the Lima of 1953 and the narrator is a young man called Marito, who works at a radio station and is also making his, thus far, futile attempts to write a story worthy of being published, using characters he hears about in his daily life. Presently, there comes into his life two characters who will shape a lot of his immediate future and perhaps more. The first of these is his Aunt Julia, his uncle’s wife’s sister, recently divorced and come from Bolivia who fires up his imagination and passion, and whom he starts to court. Her response is hesitant at first, doubts about their age difference and the scandal it would cause in the extended family at the forefront of her thoughts, but eventually she too gives in to a young man she has come to love. They meet furtively, almost like teenagers caught in the throes of first love and use the cover of movie theaters and the radio station for their assignations. Predictably, al hell breaks loose when the family comes to know and Marito’s parents decide to come down to Lima (where he stays with his grandparents) and his father, in particular, goes into an incandescent rage quite similar to the ones experienced by the characters of the daily soaps transmitted by the radio every day and which are so popular with the general public.



Ah, those daily radio soaps. Lapped up by listeners, a good collection of them are paramount to generating profits for the station. And it is here that we come into the second thread of this story. Pedro Camacho, a diminutive Bolivian import into the Lima radio scene, is a scriptwriter who ends up writing the soaps for the same station that Marito works for with great fanfare and success. Marito meets and, as much as is possible with the compulsive creator, becomes a regular confidant. It is the stories for these soaps that Camacho tirelessly rolls out from his pen that punctuate the narrative of Marito and Julia in alternating chapters here. When the first of these showed up, about a distinguished doctor who has to deal with a shocking revelation of incest within his extended family, I couldn’t figure out where this fitted in the narrative. But once it was made clear that these twisted plots were a figment of the potential genius mind of Pedro Camacho, I found them to be even more captivating than the main thread of the unconventional love affair. There are some wild creations here, which makes one understand why the fictional Peruvian audience of the story were on tenterhooks waiting for the next installment. Apart from the doctor’s story, there is one of a policeman who comes across a disfigured, starving almost savage like African and who, in the absence of any idea what to do with him, he is told to dispose of. Another one talks of a salesman who kills a child in an accident and the uniquely dubious way his psychiatrist finds to lay him off the guilt and fear. A particularly gruesome one talks of a boy who sees rats devour his baby sibling and who vows to devote the rest of his life to hunting down every last rodent, while also inadvertently terrorizing his own family in the bargain. Then there is the one of the boy born to privilege but who seems to show aptitude for nothing else other than football refereeing. But all of them somehow zone in to reach a common state in the protagonist’s life, reflecting the writer’s own insecurities with advancing age:

‘He was a man who had reached the prime of life, his fifties, and in his person – broad forehead, aquiline nose, a penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness – and in his bearing his spotless moral virtue was so apparent as to earn him people’s immediate respect.’

What is the point of these stories in this novel? I’m not sure if anything other than to point out Llosa’s outrageous inventiveness. The fictional author of these tales obviously does find ways to combat his own insecurities in these tales, like his constant motif of pointing out that the 50’s are a man’s most fulfilling age, and his avowed belief in the powers of masturbation and his sometimes-hilarious dislike of Argentines, among others. But there is a poignant aspect to them also, which become evident when the stories and characters start pouring into each other. So, a doctor in the first story may end up as another character in another story. Someone who died in one would miraculously turn up elsewhere. While initially the readers and his devoted voice actors consider these as more inventiveness from their genius, it becomes apparent later that Camacho is an intensely tired writer who no longer is able to keep sense of his characters and is slowly steeping towards mental imbalance.

Marito’s own story, though impressively detailed and punctuated with wry humor, sometimes does pale a bit in comparison to the travails of Camacho’s characters, but it is always very readable. I was slightly disappointed in the almost offhanded manner of the climax though. I guess I was expecting more of a closure on Aunt Julia’s and Camacho’s stories. Remarkably, in real life, the author was initially married to his aunt Julia and has based the character of Pedro Camacho on a similar character he met in Lima, while working as a young newspaper man, in 1953.

Real or not, it makes for another gripping story from one of the premier South American storytellers of our age, and it has left me as eager as ever to go through the rest of his back catalog.



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