Novels about writers and writing have always intrigued me. There's always some insight into the whole creative process, and if I'm lucky, there is also a hint of surreality as the lines between the fiction and reality within the confines of the story begin to blur. The back cover of Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter promised just such an intriguing mix, and I found myself unable to resist its draw on a recent bookstore venture of mine. The promise of a surreal look at the literature process, coupled with recommendation from an old co-worker raised my hopes to a relatively high level (but certainly not an impossible one), but unfortunately, the book was not all I had hoped for.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter gives us not one, but two writers through which to explore the art form. Our main character, Mario Varguitas (an autobiographical character for Vargas Llosa in more than just name), works as a news director for a small-time radio station in Peru. As much as Varguitas wants to be a writer, the reality of work and the pressures of law school classes leave him very little time to practice his craft. Add in the fact that Varguitas is far too preoccupied with symbolism and style at the expense of putting anything to actually connect with the reader into his stories, and Varguitas' writing career is off to an awfully rocky start.

Our other writer, Pedro Camacho, stands in contrast to the strained inexperience of Varguitas. Varguitas' employers have hired the already famous Camacho to join the radio station's entertainment division as a scriptwriter for the stations many serialized radio soap operas. Thanks to the intrigue, violence, betrayal, perversion, and other dark themes of his writing, the public falls in love with Camacho and keeps clamoring for more.

Rounding out the main characters is the titular Aunt Julia, Varguitas' recently divorced aunt. Seeking to experience the newfound joys of recently divorced life, she sets out on a series of adventures. Soon, she catches the eye of Varguitas and transforms into a love interest for him. (But this isn't some uncomfortable incest story that might be found among the dark radio tales of Camacho. Aunt Julia is just Varguitas' uncle's sister-in-law. She's only related by marriage.)

Mario Vargas Llosa has created an intriguing structure to balances the worlds of reality and fiction within the novel. In all the odd numbered chapters, we watch Varguitas develop a friendship with the eccentric Camacho, and we see him sneak behind the backs of his disapproving family to woo his divorced aunt. As a contrast to this main plot, the even numbered chapters each feature the plot of a different one of Pedro Camacho's radio soap operas. The plots are fairly dark and twisted, with themes of murder, lust, and betrayal, and it's not too hard to see how the entertainment-starved listeners of Peru get hooked on the stories. We also see Camacho lose his mind little by little through his stories. He spends far too much time writing his countless plotlines and neglecting his personal life, and by the book's midpoint, he's begun to loose track of which characters belong in which stories. Before long, characters who have died in one story show up in another, people change names indiscriminately, and everything builds towards an apocalyptic head.

This technique of juxtaposing the reality of the novel with the fictional world of radio stories offers a lot of interesting possibilities (not the least of which is to show how much the real world can be just as intricate and complex as a soap opera), but their biggest effect is to throw off the pacing of the book's central plot. Every time the story of Varguitas and his aunt progresses to a new level, we, the readers, are whisked away into the fantasy world of Camacho's eccentric imagination. These constant interruptions keep us from fully immersing ourselves into the main plot. The plots of these radio stories presented in the even numbered chapters also leave the reader hanging. Each one builds to a cliffhanger, ending with a "tune in for the next episode" style of questions, but never again does the story come up in the book.

I appreciate what Mario Vargas Llosa is trying to do in the book. I can see that he's explores the dangers of two extremes of the lives of writers: Varguitas fails to develop as a writer since he immerses himself too fully in trying to experience all that life has to offer, while Camacho spends so much time immersed in his work that he literally loses his mind and cannot function in the real world. Llosa spends too much time, though, focusing on style that he keeps the audience away at an arm's length. A story like this cries out for a sense of intimacy that Llosa keeps denying us.

I also felt that the surreal qualities promised in the blurb on the back cover never had a chance to fully develop. We see Camacho's radio stories creep into one another, but the line between the worlds of fiction and reality within the story remain firm. I kept hoping that elements from the lives of Camacho, Varguitas, and Aunt Julia would bleed into the radio serial plots, and that allusions made in the soap operas would also affect the main characters. Such elements would have helped to enhance the theme that real life can be as complex and involving as a soap opera, but again, Llosa seems unwilling to fully commit.

The book as a whole isn't a waste, though. The prose, translated from the original Spanish, sparkles with a rich, detailed description of the world that points towards a poetic spirit. Readers who have fallen in love with the highly stylized prose of other well-known Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, or Oscar Hijuelos will surely enjoy the writing style that Llosa displays in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, but readers new to modern Latin American fiction will find it nearly impossible to immerse themselves in the text. It's best to start elsewhere if you're trying to expand your literary horizons beyond our borders.

Recommended: No