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
[2010-10-25 12:00:00] How has Latin America manage to successfully weather the economic storms of the last few years and will the countries south of the U.S.-Mexico border emerge as leaders in the future? We'll talk this hour with Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of the new book "What if Latin America Ruled the World?: How the South Will Take the North Through the 21st Century" (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.
