BOOKS
467
works, he substitutes for their complex social realism a compara–
tively minor reflection epitomized in the book's clever epigraph
from Salvador Elizondo:
"I
write. Iwrite that 1am writing. Men–
tally, 1 see myself writing that 1 am writing.... " Free to play
with the kitsch achieved by a fanatically serious writer as op–
posed to the unrealized art of a fantasizing writer-both of which
he embraces in his own flow of words-the mature Vargas Llosa
now successfully looks back on his early life and career in cheer–
fully light, interchanging doses of pleasant eros and hysterical
sublimation.
Readers obviously.love the result, with the book achieving
great sales in the original Spanish version and, ironically, in–
spiring both a TV series and another version of the affair by
Julia, now turned writer herself. Nevertheless, Varguitas is not
fully characterized (should he be in a book with a slyly mythic
opening:
"En ese tiempo remoto"?);
Aunt Julia's charm is more
a matter of report than demonstration; and the scriptwriter
Pedro Camacho, who displays a bundle of traits and a history
that begs to be unfolded, never comes to the Dickensian or even
Bellowing life his persona implies because Vargas Llosa insists
on putting his "storied story" first-right up to the double de–
nouement of Pedro's slide into madness and Aunt Julia's eclipse
by cousin Patricia, Vargas Llosa's second wife.
Often accused in his big novels of pouring the old wine of
Balzac into the tricky new bottles of contemporary technique,
Vargas Llosa demonstrates here, as in
Capt. Pantoja,
that he
knows there is no new wine and that he's putting old bottles in–
side new ones, some with large capacities, as in
Conversation in
the Cathedral
or
The Green House,
some smaller, as in his last
two books. The technical facility and cleverness for which he is
well-known characterize both these recent works, but he has
pared their scope and leavened them with previously rejected
humor. Recalling the elaborate cross-cutting and splicing of the
panoramic novels that made him famous, some critics miss the
social and political implications central to this work and chal–
lenge
Aunt Julia
as being no more attractive than its popular
serials and fluffy romance, as if Vargas Llosa, unlike Puig, had
not made literature
from
such stuff but had patched it together
with
such stuff. The Colombian novelist Gustavo Alvarez
Gardeazabal fingered this group of readers when he accused
