and not of Helen R. Lane, whose formidable translating skills are equal to both the manic tone of Camacho's madness and the ruffled normalcy of Mario's daily life. (This, by the way, is the second of Miss Lane's translations Vargas Llosa also intends his book as satire of myriad social types and classes, and as in much comic writing, he creates extreme creatures. But Julia and Camacho have also endured in his memory as beings worthy of affection, and he dogs them with small Mulți îl apreciază pentru că e un roman semi-autobiografic, cu numele protagoniștilor păstrate, dar pentru mine acest lucru nu a contat aproape deloc. Deși gândul că ar putea fi o poveste reală mă face să zâmbesc o dată în plus. bypassing the censorship of reason.'' Camacho replies, ''Our mestizo Latin American brains can give birth to better things than those Frogs.''

The story of the furtive courtship between Mario and Julia is the central portion of Mario’s narrative, as the two fall quite hopelessly, passionately, and madly in love with each other. Their love, when it is finally discovered after their ill-starred elopement, brings down upon them a family catastrophe that competes, in all of its absurdity and odd manifestations, with elements of Camacho’s soap operas, the stories which are recounted antiphonally throughout the novel. Indeed, the comedy of errors of their elopement—they dash about the countryside to find a mayor who will, for a bribe, marry the underage Mario without parental consent—has exactly enough improbability about it to make it truly resemble the vicissitudes of real life. So does life often resemble bad literature and B-pictures. Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust,

Camacho lives monastically, loathes money, snubs the fame his serials give him. When he writes, he assumes roles physically, wearing false mustaches, a fireman's hat, the mask of a fat woman. Mario finds him at his enormous typewriter, writing about

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of few Nobel winning writers I have wanted to read for ages, but I have to admit, he wasn't near the top of the list, until I came across this novel (which I knew nothing about), But for whatever reason it just appealed to me, it called my name, tempting me in, so I took the Peruvian plunge. Having never read a book set there before I didn't know what to expect, but my literary trip to Lima worked out pretty well in the end. I thought (or I'd hoped) his style may have been similar to that of Latin American counterparts Roberto Bolaño or Gabriel García Márquez, but no, not really, Llosa has a distinctive style all of his own, which, on the whole I much enjoyed.Its pacing reminds me a bit of Rossini’s William Tell Overture – starts off quietly, the race begins, the crashing storm and then peace reigns as everything settles down.