Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter See Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter Details
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Reality merges with fantasy in this hilarious comic novel about the world of radio soap operas and the pitfalls of forbidden passion by the bestselling author of The Storyteller. Sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia, now divorced, seeks a new mate who can support her in high style. She finds instead her libidinous nephew, and their affair shocks both famiy and community.
Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter Reviews
Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter : Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter Reviews
| 56 of 56 people found the following review helpful  Life as soap opera, life as art, By This review is from: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback) At its most basic level, Vargas Llosa's most famous novel is a portrait of the writer as a young man. The semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Mario is a young student and would-be writer whose careers and aspirations are disrupted when he falls in love with his aunt-in-law, much to the horror of their many friends and relatives living in Lima. Pedro Camacho, an eccentric (to say the least) Bolivian scriptwriter, has been hired at the radio station where Mario works, and the youth envies the prodigious output of Pedro's intricate soap operas and hopes to learn from his new mentor the secrets of being an artist. The chapters alternate between descriptions of Mario's amusing and increasingly complicated life and Pedro's formulaic and decreasingly coherent scripts, as each character is gradually overwhelmed by the burdens and expectations they've created for themselves.On a deeper level, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" is about artistic failure: Mario's writing suffers... Read more 35 of 35 people found the following review helpful  What Little Vargas said, By This review is from: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback) Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is without a doubt Mario Vargas-Llosa's most entertaining book, intelligent without being difficult and hilarious without being patronizing. Some of the most subtle points are lost in translation -- "escribidor" in the original title, for example, has a sense of someone simply taking dictation or producing a text by rote compared to the word "scriptwriter" used in the English language version -- but that is the only significant weak point and is not enough to withhold a five-star rating for this wonderful book. The book's account is semi-autobiographical, with two story lines alternating chapters -- a style employed in several other Vargas Llosa novels -- until they begin to link together like cogs in the gears of the narrative. But it is the way they mesh together that is part of the magic in this book. Without giving away the story line here, let it suffice to say that at certain points you'll find yourself smiling and flipping back through the... Read more 19 of 20 people found the following review helpful As good as it gets!, By This review is from: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback) When I really think about it, the worst thing I can say about Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is that I did not want the book to end so soon. Like all great books, the story transported me to another place, in this case it is Lima in the 1950s. Here, aunts like fiction but they don't enjoy literature. And scriptwriters don't write literature, but produce large quantities of fiction.Before the appearance of television, in Peru, the radio theatre (the ancestor of today's soap operas) was an important presence in the lives of the citizens of Lima. At Radio Central, a scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, uses that stage to manipulate his audience's need for tales of horror and love. At Radio Panamericana, a young news editor cuts articles out of the local newspapers and rewrites them for news bulletins. He checks his collaborator's appetite for catastrophes and falls in love with his aunt, a newly divorced Bolivian who comes to Lima in search for a profitable match. |
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