Author(s): Mario Vargas Llosa

Fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa's classic autobiographical novel about a forbidden love affair, a manic radio scriptwriter, and the hilarious trials of an aspiring fiction writer. Mario Vargas Llosa's masterful, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, 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 first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older. The two begin a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas hold the city's listeners in thrall, and who chooses young Marito as his only confidant as he slowly goes insane. Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of 1982 by the "New York Times,"