A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Peruvian
TICK, EDWARD
A Portrait of the Artist As a lebung Peruvian Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter By Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Helen R. Lane Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 374 pp. $16.50. Reviewed by Edward Tick A...
...In those long ago days, I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls...
...The station is dedicated to importing "sophisticated" fare-new York jazz, rock and programs of intellectual interest...
...He creates increasingly gruesome cataclysms-riots, earthquakes, murders...
...The first is Aunt Julia, whom Mario bumps into at one of many lunches with his extended family...
...Mario might have passed his life trifling with short stories and eventually scratching out a law degree and a living...
...Its biggest hits are soap operas imported from pre-Castro Cuba, portrayed by Llosa as a sort of 1950s Caribbean Peyton Place...
...Reviewed by Edward Tick A writer's coming of age is at once ridiculous and sublime...
...The third brings us into the chambers of an examining criminal magistrate investigating the horrid rape of a 13-year-old...
...We get a comprehensive portrait-in-passing of mid-20th century Peru, from its urban grandeur and squalor through its villages tenuously linked by the remnants of a transit system, to its outposts and jungles where natives fish, drink, spawn, and seriocomically attempt to conform to a bureaucracy that makes no sense to them yet is respected and feared...
...He hates her "instantly," and is annoyed at being introduced as "an intellectual...
...They attend movies and neck, meet in cafes and fool around under the table...
...Part Ahab, part Joycean expatriate, part buffoon, Pedro Camacho is also the obsessed writer, the megalomaniac pitting his ego against the cosmos...
...But he comes upon two individuals who change him from a mere product of his surroundings into its keen observer and wry commentator...
...In time they elope...
...Mario's job consists of clipping news items from the daily newspapers and rewriting them slightly so they can be read on the air...
...as for Peruvian selections, they were cautiously screened and allowed on the air only if they were waltzes...
...We have seen how love and creativity grow and how they die...
...The station's owner complains, "We aren't paying him to be original...
...These serials attract a vast audience and hefty commercial sponsorship, the true sign of success in a culture with bourgeois pretensions...
...Much of the novel is devoted to their sometimes funny, sometimes ironic, always clandestine courting...
...Camacho is a high priest of art, writing feverishly for 10 hours a day as well as directing and acting in the radio serials he produces...
...We know how young Marito grew up to be Mario Vargas Llosa...
...The young girl turns out to be a vicious Lolita and the supposed rapist a religious fanatic who attempts to "cut it off and throw it in the trash to prove how little it means...
...Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's best-known modern author, provides a good dose of both emotions in his newly translated semi-autobiographical novel...
...At first, these shifts are interpreted as the excesses of a Modernist...
...We long for the relief of deterioration, much as many people long for the six o'clock news to excite them with another important crisis...
...This hilarious adventure is one of the high points of the novel...
...This is not really a matter of love and we are more fascinated with their doings than with their personalities...
...Pedro Camacho is one of those creations who is fascinating and incisive because of his sufferings and deformity...
...The weaknesses are purposeful, however...
...Whether or not his works would endure didn't matter in the least to him...
...Alternating chapters are Camacho's short stories, where we glimpse the inner workings of a person wholly dedicated to expressing his version of truth, no matter what the personal consequences...
...Like so many artists in the modern age, he becomes a victim of the processes he scrutinizes...
...Julia meanwhile enables Mario to sexually and romantically mature...
...We first meet him as "News Director of Radio Panamericana...
...the honest sergeant is eventually ordered to murder the hapless primitive and dispose of the body, for his bureaucracy has no way of dealing with such unlikely situations...
...Indigenous creations are censored...
...In secret, he dresses like the people he is fabricating...
...Julia alternately ridicules and flirts with his youthful touchiness, talent and vigor...
...Thus does the narrator, also named Mario, begin his tale...
...We are, at times, too close to the banalities, to the details of family dinners and petty intrigues...
...we're paying him to entertain our listeners...
...From their first meeting the competition is set...
...Camacho's look in the mirror becomes too honest, and the listeners, the readers, the financial supporters, turn to new distractions...
...He is "a miniscule figure, on the very borderline between a man extremely short in stature and a dwarf, with a huge nose and unusually bright eyes with a disturbing, downright abnormal gleam in them...
...This station broadcasts Peruvian music and has a "popular, plebian, frankly parochial appeal...
...As Mario's romance with Julia progresses, so does Camacho's exploration of Peruvian culture...
...By the end of the book, we know the people in it intimately...
...But what is missing in them is more than compensated for in the scriptwriter, Pedro Ca-macho...
...Julia is a 32-year-old divorcee, a forerunner of the liberated woman who flouts decorum by reckless dating...
...He confuses characters and plots, resurrecting a dead person from one story to a new profession in another, then killing him or her a second time...
...The tone, pace and coloring of his language are at times reminiscent of adult fairy tales, of stories told to symbolically prepare children for the harsh realities of grownup life...
...With his outraged father gunning for him in the streets of Lima?Mario's own life has become something of a soap opera????the couple embarks on a trek to the primitive villages and jungles of Peru to find a justice of the peace who will illegally marry a minor and a divorcee from Bolivia...
...Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is successful on many levels, but it has the weaknesses of the soap operas it emulates...
...As Nietzsche observed, though, one who experiences the annihilation of nature experiences inner annihilation: In the course of revealing the decay of his culture, Camacho's personality fragments...
...Mario, a passionate 18-year-old Peruvian law student and would-be writer, certainly needs to be initiated into adulthood...
...Unwittingly, we come to know the intricate and contradictory South American landscape...
...The second takes us into the Peruvian night where a Civil Guard discovers a naked, tattooed black stowaway with whom he cannot communicate...
...He's had a short story published...
...Between broadcasts he attends school, shares a meal at one of his numerous relatives' homes, or drops in at lively Radio Central, owned by the same family that owns Radio Panamericana?the oligarchy of the media...
...With this character the novel becomes special...
...Most important, we have, along with Mario, answered some of the questions he struggles wit h...
...His first story tells of a goodly physician's discovery of incest in an upper crust family on the day of the daughter's wedding to an innocent...
...Camacho enables Llosa to give his novel a fascinating structure...
...For him, to live was to write...
...His need to theorize, to turn everything into an impersonal truth, an eternal axiom, was as compulsive as his need to write...
...In talking with him, Mario realizes that Camacho is forever balanced on the brink of sanity, seeing as deeply into the distortions of the psyche as it is permitted a sane person to see...
...She represents the perfect conquest for young Mario...
...Each of Camacho's increasingly decadent stories destroys the surface respectability of some social institution?religion, family, legal system, business?to expose the horrors underneath...
...We have observed both the tedium and the fantasies of the mind in obsessed love and creative turmoil...
...With this work we have the story of a writer's transformation and emergence in contemporary South America...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 21
