Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas LlosaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm thoroughly taken by Latin writers and Mr. Llosa is one of them. In the case of Mr. Llosa, reading him is like a refuge in illusion. My first with him is set in Peru during the 1950s, it is the story of an 18 year old student who falls for a 32 year old divorcee. The novel is based on the author's real life experience. The plot concerns Mario, an aspiring writer, who works at a radio station that broadcasts, live each day, up to a half-dozen novelas (short-run soap operas). At the same time that the author meets his "Aunt Julia", the radio station, which had been buying scripts by weight from Cuba, hires a Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair and includes descriptions of the serials that the station broadcasts. As the novel progresses, the scripts begin to "fall apart" - the scriptwriter begins to lose track of the names of the characters, the details of his plots, etc., to the point where they become "hopelessly jumbled."
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