The Bad Girl

Ricardo and the Bad Girl

The novel is structured around five encounters spread across five decades. Ricardo Somocurcio first sees the girl who will define his life in Lima in the 1950s, when she presents herself as a Peruvian from Tacna. They are fifteen and he falls immediately. When her invented identity is exposed, she vanishes. He will not see her again for years.

The structure of the novel is the structure of this waiting. Ricardo moves to Paris, becomes a conference interpreter — a man who earns his living reproducing other people’s words in other languages, a vocation that suits the novel’s themes of identity and performance — and makes a life in the city of his dreams. Between the bad girl’s appearances, we see that life: the cafés, the work, the modest pleasures, the Peruvian exile community, the history of Paris from the 1960s through the 1990s unfolding around him. Ricardo is not a passive observer of his own non-romantic life; he is genuinely present to it, genuinely content with much of it. But the bad girl’s reappearances reveal that he has been, all along, essentially waiting.

Each time she returns — as a Cuban revolutionary, as the wife of a French diplomat, as the possession of a Japanese millionaire, as a gangster’s companion — she allows Ricardo a brief season of intimacy before she leaves again, and usually takes something from him when she goes. Money, time, the possibility of other loves. He never stops knowing what she is. He never stops. This is not presented as weakness but as a fact about Ricardo’s nature — about what he is, revealed through what he cannot escape. The novel’s honesty is that it does not pretend this is healthy and does not pretend it is meaningless.

The Bad Girl’s Transformations

The woman Ricardo loves is never the same woman twice, at least in presentation. Each of her identities — the Peruvian provincial, the Cuban militant, the diplomat’s wife, the Madame in London, the criminal’s girlfriend — is adopted fully and shed without apparent difficulty. She speaks different languages, performs different classes, inhabits different worlds, and does all of it convincingly enough to sustain the performance for years.

What Vargas Llosa is doing with these transformations is raising a question he does not fully answer: is there a self beneath the identities, or is the bad girl only the sum of her performances? Her origins are obscure and possibly invented. Her motivations are never transparently explained. She is, in Ricardo’s framing, a woman who decided very early that she would not be poor again and has pursued that goal without sentimentality. In his most sympathetic moments, he understands her as someone shaped by a deprivation he was spared.

Whether she loves Ricardo is the question the novel circles without resolving. There are moments that suggest she does, in her way. There are actions that suggest she does not, or that love as Ricardo would define it is not a category available to her. The novel’s refusal to resolve this question is one of its great choices: the bad girl remains opaque in the way that actual people remain opaque to the people who love them most obsessively.

Flaubert in Lima

Vargas Llosa has written extensively about Flaubert — he produced a critical study of Madame Bovary, The Perpetual Orgy, in 1975 — and acknowledged Sentimental Education as the model for The Bad Girl. The parallel is precise: Frédéric Moreau’s decades-long, self-defeating love for Madame Arnoux becomes Ricardo’s decades-long, self-defeating love for the bad girl. Both novels are about the education that romantic disappointment provides, and both are honest that this education, while real, is not sufficient to change anything fundamental about their protagonists.

The difference is tonal. Flaubert is chilly and ironic; Vargas Llosa is warmer, more willing to let the love be real alongside the masochism. Ricardo is not a satirical portrait of the sentimental man but a sympathetic one, and the ending of the novel — which I will not describe — is allowed to earn an emotion that Sentimental Education famously withholds from Frédéric.

The Bad Girl was published in 2006, four years before the Nobel Prize. It is not Vargas Llosa at his most politically ambitious, but it is Vargas Llosa at his most direct about private life, and for some readers that directness makes it the most immediately available of his novels. For readers who have already read Aunt Julia, it offers a different but related exploration of what romantic obsession does to the man who cannot escape it — this time with less comedy and more consequence.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Vargas Llosa’s most romantic novel and his most Flaubertian: an honest, warm, and ultimately moving portrait of a man who cannot stop loving the wrong woman across five decades.