books

I recently gave in my notice at the bookshop. It has been a great 1.5 years but I need more money to pay off my student debt, so I had to start looking elsewhere.
And was lucky enough to be offered a job working for a Russian news agency, so we shall see where that will lead me.
But I will really miss my collegues at the book shop, as well as the books. One of the great parts of the job has been the constant exposure to new fiction, and realising just how much stuff is out there. I recently read Travesuras de la nina mala by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whom I have always detested. But we got his most recent book in English in the shop, and it looked interesting, so I decided to try to get over my prejudice and read it. I tracked it down in Spanish in Buenos Aires, and then oddly got given a French copy in paris….and I confess that I was completely mesmerized from the start. It is, ultimately, a twisted love story….the dynamics of the two main characters are troubling and uncomfortable. You know early on that there will be no happy ending here. The female main character is a deracinated modern madame bovary, incapable of supporting the bourgeois life proposed to her by the only man who truly loves her. But it is not only the perverse characters that drew me in. the novel sweeps through the second half of the 20th century, from peru in the 50s to paris in its early 60s heyday, to London in the late 60s and 70s to Tokyo in the 80s and Madrid in 90s. conservatism, Sartre, post structuralism, anti Vietnam protests in Trafalgar square, AIDS, high tech globalization- it is literally all there too, but only ever as an intriguing background.
So having got so wrapped up in the work, I decided to give Vargas Llosa’s writing’s another go, thinking my earlier prejudice was perhaps the remains of a more activist youth…..but no. on an Iberia flight to Madrid recently, I picked up an article he wrote in El Pais on Argentina. And he is, as I always thought, a twat. The article made me annoyed. It trashes the current argentine intellectual scene with the ressentiment of someone with a serious complex. Vargas Llosa has always annoyed me for his very right wing views, intolerance, and his self satisfied views towards his position. A brief scanning of recent articles in le Monde and el Pais confirmed I still find him as annoying as 10 years ago when I was studying the latin American Boom.
And yet I loved his last book. My friend Cesare pointed out you don’t have to like a writer to like his work, and he gave the excellent example of celine, an excellent writer, yet an appalling anti- semite and human. At work, my collegue james pointed out that surely SOME right-wingers are capable of producing quality literature, and correctly noted the way in which the European left has long monopolized the field. It is an interesting question….but ultimately what I look for is good fiction, and Travesuras de la nina mala more than provided me with that, to Vargas Llosa’s full credit.