Another Llosa -- The Way to Paradise

I don't think I would have finished this novel except that it read too much like my second passion after murder mysteries, that being biographies. Llosa alternates chapters between the lives of painter Paul Gauguin and his maternal grandmother Flora Tristan, famous in her own right as one of the first female socialists in France in the mid 1800s.

Both are rebels; are less than perfect parents; are possessed with wanderlust and a cause to be noted for something completely different than the prevailing mores of their generations; have painful diseases in middle age that results in their addiction to opiates.

Llosa uses many structural devices to move the story along -- changing the intervention and commentary of the narrator, especially in Flora's story and here too juxtaposing her current travels with those when she returned to Peru to try to get a piece of her family's wealth. His talents as a writer are transparent to the strong lives of the two characters and he rarely intrudes with judgments or any moralistic interpretations. As a result, the novel reads more like a documentary and the only quote worth ruminating on is only 40 pages or so from the ending when Gauguin is thinking back on those people who influenced his art. Recalling a Turkish artist, philosopher and theologian whom he read in his early career, Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi: "... Color, according to him, was something deeper and more subjective than could be found in the natural world. It was a manifestation of human sentiments, beliefs, fantasies. All the spirituality of an age, and all its ... angels and demons were expressed in the values given to different colors, and the way color was used. That was why real artists shouldn't feel themselves bound to literal representation when faced with the natural world ... It was their obligation to use colors in accordance with their innermost compulsions, or simply their private whim ... " As an aspiring mercenary decorator, I recognized the need to express my feelings in colors and patterns that spoke primarily to me but also elicited a sense of contemporary style.

I also want to extend this definition of an artist's use of color to a writer's use of words. Palinuro in Mexico is a novel length poem, lush with startling similes and metaphors that would otherwise, and maybe still is, scandalous in its topics. More to come on that one.

Like all good biographies, the six degrees of separation comes into play as Flora encounters Karl Marx and Gauguin interacts with contemporary Impressionists.