Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

Varguitas and Julia

The autobiographical strand of the novel follows Varguitas — a lightly fictionalized eighteen-year-old Mario Vargas Llosa — working at a Lima radio station in the 1950s, writing news bulletins, dreaming of becoming a serious writer, and living the constrained but vivid life of a middle-class young man in a city that feels simultaneously the center of everything and very far from Paris. When his uncle’s recently divorced Bolivian wife, Julia, arrives to stay with the family, Varguitas falls in love with a woman fifteen years his senior, and the novel becomes a chronicle of their courtship, the families’ increasingly alarmed opposition, and the couple’s escalating stratagems to stay together.

Vargas Llosa’s portrait of the Lima of his youth is one of the pleasures of the novel — the specific geography of Miraflores and the radio station, the class anxieties of a family that has enough respectability to worry about it, the literary ambitions of a teenager who reads Faulkner and Hemingway and believes, with complete sincerity, that he will one day write a masterpiece. The romance with Julia is rendered with affectionate comedy: this is not a novel about romantic tragedy but about the comedy of desire colliding with convention, and Vargas Llosa writes it with a warmth that is rare in his work.

This strand of the novel is based on Vargas Llosa’s own first marriage, to his aunt-by-marriage Julia Urquidi, which lasted a decade before they divorced. Julia subsequently wrote her own account of their relationship, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (“What Little Vargas Didn’t Say”), disputing various details of his version. The novel’s status as autobiographical fiction rather than memoir is thus not just a technical distinction but a source of real-world dispute.

Pedro Camacho

The novel’s other protagonist — and arguably its most memorable creation — is Pedro Camacho, a Bolivian scriptwriter hired by the radio station to produce soap operas. Camacho is a phenomenon: he writes, acts in, directs, and sound-designs his own radionovelas at an output that no ordinary human could sustain. He works constantly, eats almost nothing, has no personal life, and regards the world as raw material for his scripts. He is also, in his own estimation, a genius — and the novel takes his estimation seriously enough to give his soap operas their own chapters.

The alternating structure of the novel is its formal masterstroke. Even-numbered chapters follow Varguitas and Julia; odd-numbered chapters reproduce excerpts from Camacho’s radionovelas — melodramas of Lima life involving murders, accidents, illicit passions, and catastrophes of every description, written with a hypercharged grandiosity that is both a loving parody of the form and a genuine example of it. As the novel progresses, the radionovelas begin to break down: characters from one serial appear in another, ages and names shift, plots become incoherent. Camacho’s mind is going, and his disintegration is visible in his scripts before it becomes visible to anyone around him.

The comedy of Camacho is the comedy of absolute dedication to a form that others consider trivial — and the tragedy is that his dedication is not entirely wrong. The radionovelas are not great art, but they are not nothing. They give pleasure to thousands of listeners. Camacho’s breakdown is the breakdown of a man who believed his work mattered and could not sustain that belief in the face of reality.

The Novel’s Comedy

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the natural first Vargas Llosa for readers who have not yet read him. It is shorter than his major political novels, funnier than any of them, and formally inventive in ways that are pleasurable rather than demanding. The alternating structure — autobiography vs. radionovela — introduces Vargas Llosa’s habit of weaving multiple narrative threads without the full complexity of Conversation in the Cathedral, and the radionovela parodies are funny enough to carry a reader through even the most extravagant examples.

The novel also has a metafictional dimension that rewards attention: a novelist writing about an aspiring novelist who is absorbing lessons in storytelling from a soap opera writer is making an argument about where narrative forms come from and who teaches whom. Vargas Llosa, the Nobel laureate, learned something from Pedro Camacho. That is the novel’s most serious joke.

When Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize in 2010, international readers looking for an entry point frequently found their way to Aunt Julia. That instinct is correct. It is not his greatest novel, but it may be his most lovable, and it makes the rest of his work more approachable for having been read first.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The ideal Vargas Llosa entry point: comic, inventive, autobiographical, and warm. Pedro Camacho alone is worth the price of admission.