I’ve always had an ambiguous relationship with Llosa. Books have been started, but for a variety of reasons, remain unfinished. The War at the End of the World was left behind on the back-seat of an auto rickshaw, 120 pages in; The Dream of the Celt was interrupted by a change of continents, and the consequent loss of Blackwell’s Bookshop, which allowed you to take books to their cafe and read them cover to cover. This time, I took up Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and – thank heavens! – managed to finish it. Actually, it is a hard book not to finish. Unlike Llosa’s other writing, which is characterised by dense prose, indubitably complex, multi-faceted plot-lines, and a proliferating cast of characters, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a racy comic novel, an unabashed farce with, of course, a very distinctive Latin American flavour.
Aunt Julia, set in Lima during the mid-20th century, is a thinly-disguised autobiographical story about 18-year old Vargas, part-time news-editor for Radio Pana-mericana and part-time Law Student, who falls uproariously for his 32-year old, divorced Aunt Julia (an aunt, but not a blood-relative). At around the same time Pedro Camacho, a Bolivian script-writer and actor, with an implacable hatred for Argentines, arrives to take over the production of radio plays for the organisation. As their courtship progresses, from hand-holding and long walks to an improbable bid for marriage, via fights and reconciliations, stiff filial opposition (including a gun-toting father) and much help from friends, Pedro Camacho’s radio plays grow zanier and zanier, with characters appearing and re-appearing, dying and being resurrected, until a final genocidal climax, which also coincides with the climax of the courtship.
Apart from its memorable characters (including the sidekicks, who often steal the show) and delectable twists and turns, Aunt Julia contains some hilarious (and hilariously sharp) reflections about the writing life. Pedro Camacho, an unabashed caricature of the classic literary genius immersed in his work, dresses up as his characters while he writes, so that he can get into the feel of things. Vargas himself is an agonised writer-in-waiting, who dreams about living in a garret in Paris, and wants to write a story called The Qualitative Leap, which – in a quite brilliant one-line portrayal of the anxiety of influence – will be “as coldly objective, intellectual, terse, and ironic as one of Borges’s – an author whom I had just discovered at that time.” When he first meets Aunt Julia, and is attempting to impress her without even knowing it, he explains to her, in classically endearing 18-year old fashion, that:
“… love didn’t exist, that it was the invention of an Italian named Petrarch and the Provencal troubadours. That what people thought was a crystal-clear outpouring of emotion, a pure effusion of sentiment, was merely the instinctive desire of cats in heat hidden beneath the poetic words and myths of literature.”
… before immediately conceding to his audience that he doesn’t believe a word of it. Vargas, as a character, is splendid: cocky without being cocksure, headstrong, but not annoyingly so; self-conscious but not to a fault; reflective, but never consumed by his own interior world. It is difficult not to see at least parts of one’s own 18-year old self in him, and almost impossible to refrain from caring very intensely about his fate, which for most of the novel, seems as precariously balanced as a pig upon a beanstalk.
Aunt Julia is a book of multiple narratives. The main story – the courtship of Vargas and Julia – is punctuated, after every chapter, by a Pedro Camacho radio play, recounted in third-person, like a story. Being reductive, one can say that the book is composed of one novella, broken up by many short stories, none of whom bear any tangible resemblance to each other. For a long time, I attempted – unsuccessfully – to work out the relationship between the main storyline and each of the radio plays (potboilers filled with incest, murder, insanity, betrayal and everything else that Baudelaire would maintain ought to splash the canvas of our lives with their colours). This review quotes Llosa as saying that one of his intentions was “to prove that his own early world and the world of soap opera were not so very different from each other”, and goes on to compare the main storyline (set in the real world) with the plots of a soap opera, especially in its explosive climax.
There is, admittedly, some truth in that; and there are a couple of places in the novel where Llosa deliberately blurs the line between “real-life” and a Camacho soap opera. But I feel that that is not entirely convincing. The Pedro Camacho soaps have just that extra layer of exaggeration, that hint of the grotesque and the weird, that places them in the realm of fiction. The story of the deranged rat-killer who may or may not be eaten by rats at the end, the story of the good-for-nothing lad who becomes the greatest football referee in Latin America, and so on – for such stories, at the end of the day, it is difficult to entirely suspend disbelief, while the Vargas-Julia episodes suffer from no such infirmity: they are entirely, viscerally believable. Of course, real life and soap operas hardly mirror each other – and Llosa himself said he wanted to prove they were “not so very different”.
Ultimately, though, I was left with the feeling that perhaps it is best not to look for connections. Perhaps Aunt Julia simply shows us that the novel and the short story can exist together in a book, that can be enjoyed as a book with multiple, unconnected narratives, and nothing more.
anenduringromantic 
I read this as a teenager and absolutely loved it, but that’s all I recall of it until your review. Given how you describe it I suspect it was a good age to read it.
If it’s any consolation I didn’t even make it to page 120 of War.
Ha, I do think that putting oneself in the Vargas’ shoes is the best way to enjoy this book to the hilt, and for that, one does need to be a teenager! Regrettably, I exited that phase of life more than a half-decade ago.