"Winning Novels About Failure" from the Wall Street Journal

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; By Mario Vargas Llosa (1977); 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" is a novel on a thousand errands, not the least of them a sort of spoofing of magic realism while reveling in its conventions. There is so much comic gusto in the spiraling decline of Pedro Camacho, a phenomenally successful writer of radio soap operas, that it is hard to remember that what we're watching is Camacho's mind "falling to pieces." The joy of the story lies in its brilliant confusion of Camacho's scripts, as overproduction (10 serials a day) leads him to forget which characters belong in which soap opera and each spills uncontrollably into the other. Camacho's hospitalization no more distresses us than his final demotion to the job of hack reporter. Call it callousness, but comic failure, too, must have its place. Especially when, in the telling, it has felt so much like creative success.

See the rest of 6 books about failure, here. See also: The Feast of the Goat: A Novel, The War of the End of the World, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Bad Girl: A Novel