Though I Was Easing into LLosa

When someone wins a Nobel Prize for literature and I haven’t read his works, I attempt to make up this deficit. Rushing to Wiki to skim through the titles and themes of his oeuvre, I decided that novels of South American politics were not something I wanted to start with, especially with rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude for book club this month. So, I reserved several volumes to ease myself into Mario Vargas Llosa’s world.

I couldn’t have selected a more atypical and challenging beginning than The Perfect Orgy. Not to be confused with a topic like Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, this book reads like a PhD thesis on the structure and technique Flaubert employed in writing Madame Bovary and the novel’s subsequent influence on other authors.

The book is divided into three major sections. The first is Llosa’s apologia for why he loves Emma Bovary so much, both as an unforgettable literary character and as a respite for his personal throes. Part Two has two subdivisions: Pen Man, is a series of questions and answers that investigates possible story sources and events in Flaubert’s life that influenced the content; and the much more analytical, parsing of the structure, The Added Element. Replicating most of the subtitles herein best gives an idea about the comprehensiveness and intelligence Llosa displays:
Things humanized and human beings turned into things
A binary world, including money and love and a masculinized Emma
The use of time – singular or specific, circular or repetitious, immobile or plastic eternity, and imaginary time
Variations on the narrator – the plural, omniscient, and singular-character
The innovative use of italics and the creation of style indirect libre

Finally in Part Three, Llosa acknowledges Madame Bovary as the First Modern Novel, for it containing the first anti-hero, the first use of interior monologue, and the first recognition that non-extreme topics/people are valid subjects.

This book should be a contemporary bible for literary critics. It made me realize that all my attempts to uplift book club discussions are still rather rudimentary and sophomoric. When one of the Slackers was over yesterday afternoon, the woman who wrote two mini-theses in graduate school on style including one on the use of circular time in comedy, I offered to lend her the book, renew it if necessary to make her feel like a fully mentally engaged student again. I told her that even though I am almost finished with my second reading of A Hundred Years of Solitude, I know now I have completely overlooked the role of the narrator and the construct of time advancing plot.

I certainly will expect Llosa to use such understructure in his novels and will aggressively try to spot them. I have started two other of his novels: a parallel fictionalized biography of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother (again a title that seduced me, The Way to Paradise) and a much more reader-friendly murder mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero? Perhaps these two are not substantial enough to evidence a Bovary-like composition, but I will more consciously look for that.