Should This Be My Last Llosa -- Aunt Julia and the Script-Writer

I double checked to see where this novel fell in the chronological order of Llosa's books because it reads like an author who has not yet discovered his forte. Thinking about how to describe it last night, I thought of a clothes line. Conveniently, Llosa can write a series of short unrelated vignettes (the wash) and just string them together by having the narrator and other main character work in a radio station writing news and soap operas, respectively. The script-writer is named Pedro Camacho and I guess this was one of Llosa's favorites as he mentions him in The Language of Passion. However, Pedro is not an unforgettable character per se, only through the clever tales he tells.

Which brings up my main problem with the book ... specifically, all the mini-stories scattered herein have practically no dialogue in them. Now, how can they be produced for radio without characters talking through the plot?

In addition, the novel is supposed to be hilariously funny. One convection Llosa uses is to have the characters from one soap opera move into another and those who have met untimely death or accidents return in other scenes resurrected and in full health but with slightly different careers. Maybe as a male, Llosa never spent his sick days watching American soap operas when drugged up with anti-histamines so the stories always got mixed up in the viewer's (my) mind.

The laundry line that is used as the device to support the short stories is Mario's crush on his aunt who is fourteen years or so older than him and divorced. (I just flipped over to Wiki again and this is extremely autobiographical as Llosa married his maternal uncle's sister-in-law when he was 19 and she ten years older.) Llosa recounts the scandal this brought on his family and the funniest part of the book is their traveling through the countryside trying to find a magistrate willing to break the law and marry an underage man.

After nineteen chapters of this unrequited courtship, elopement and setting up a household in Paris, chapter twenty begins: "The marriage to Aunt Julia was really a success and it lasted a good bit longer than all the parents and even herself feared, wished, or predicted: eight years."
With that Llosa dispenses with her without any hint of why they broke up or what the intervening years meant to him. As dismissive as he is to his ex-wife, Pedro reemerges when Mario returns to Peru for his annual visit as an office boy / errand runner for a failing scandal sheet newspaper. Pedro does not remember him, Lima is crowded with people from the country drawn to scant opportunity in the city, oh and by the way, Mario is married now to his cousin. Shades of 100 Years' incest?

I only have one more Llosa book in my pile, the one about Gaughin and his grandmother, and when I started it, it didn't grab me. Maybe his masterpiece is Conversations in the Cathedral and I should at least skim through it, but I think I am off South American literature for a while. Started Madame Bovary based on Llosa's fantastic critique of it and to meet my pledge to one of the Slackers who considers it her favorite book. It is like deja vu reading it because Llosa quoted it so extensively. So maybe like reliving her graduate school high points, I will go back to finish Edwin Drood and the recent book that writes an ending for it.