- Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
- Amazon Link
As soon as I read a few pages of this book, I was blown away by the imagination of this author and began to appreciate why he won the Nobel Prize in 2010. Almost every chapter launches into a whole another story that is wildly inventive in itself. The author also made an attempt at intersecting all of these with some common characters and I probably lost a few of these threads as I progressed through the book.
The book is set in Lima, Peru and describes the life of a young struggling student called Marito who works in the news department of a local radio station. He aspires to be an author, but is studying law in the local University. He encounters some interesting characters at the radio station and very quickly finds himself falling in love with his aunt Julia who is visiting from Bolivia. What I didn't realize until much later is that this is a fictionalized version of the author's life history and is actually quite close to the events in his real life.
The translation does make for some rather convoluted sentence construction and I found myself having to read some lines a few times to make sure that I followed the subject and predicate. Nevertheless, the book is an easy read and is very enjoyable. I read later on that it has been made into an English movie that is set in New Orleans. The latter would not have been straightforward as most of the events in the book are set around south american culture that is not easily transposed into American mainstream way of life.
Overall, the book is a very interesting read and will make you appreciate the imagination and life of Mario Vargas Llosa.
No comments:
Post a Comment