The bad girl – Mario Vargas Llosa
Posted on May 29, 2008 under romance novel |
At this point, my idea of rashness evolves around one single thought: should I go to Prague and watch the rain from Cafe Arco, the place where Kafka read from The Process to his friends or should I taste a delicious croissant croustillant at Les Deux Magots? If that’s not possible, please let me walk on Nevski Prospekt during the white nights …
On the fourth cover of the book, I read in bewilderment that this is the first romance that Llosa wrote. At 70. Love… I would probably say that it is more like an obsession, that deviant behavior that makes us, in a perverted way, to become emotionally attached to people who hurt us most.
The bad bad girl
Maybe the reason why I’m so suspicious about this novel is because everything is baldly told. Or too abruptly. The reader is “told” everything, can’t imagine things, can’t perceive essential things about the characters. That’s why even the hero is not very consistent. The woman (we find out her real name only later) runs a chameleon-like existence, which leads imagination to the “mean reds” girl, Holly Golightly. She is a master of disguise, she adjusts very easily to each and every environment in which she needs to survive, being an insensitive self-seeker, restless and proving immature behavior. Maybe just in the end, when she becomes physically challenged, when it is impossible for her to be mean anymore, she cools down.
During four decades, the narrator pursues this complicated story of love for an unstable little woman, always on the run. This rash girl continuously appears in the life of the short translator, who desperately loves her and who wails that she is the reason why he cannot lead a normal life. Emphasizing the moments where the two of them are together (hazardous meetings for her and due to fate for him), the story’s background is rendered by Lima, Paris, London and Tokyo. In Peru, the mean girl is still forming her personality, in Paris she is very charming and mysterious, in England a true lady, while in Japan she becomes really cruel, going from naivety to a fierce perversion of both her body and soul.
The good boy
The narrator, who actually leads an interesting life with his job as an UNESCO translator, with missions in different countries which give him the chance to live his childhood dream (that of living in Paris), violently scorns himself when he finds out that “his girl” has left again. A man who is actually strong, with a great concentration capacity and who gathers around him people as interesting as he is (the atypical hippie, Barreto, or the lead soldiers collector, Toledano). The life of this “good boy” is arid because he doesn’t really manage to fit in, in opposition with the woman of his life who feels everywhere like home. His passions, the movies, the plays, disks, translations from Russian classics, the persevering work or the political life of those times (as agitated in Europe as in Latin America) are silenced by the volcano represented by this woman who always manages to ruin him, both physically and morally.
The speech is to be noted, their conversations always start in the same way, she wants to hear sweet things from his mouth and he wishes to marry her in order to consume the bourgeois lifestyle that he was meant for. One thing is for sure: the American movies lied: “the good boy ” and “the bad girl ” can’t live together because they are driven by selfishness, immaturity and a languor that can’t be understood, who makes them unable to set things clear.