468
PARTISAN REVIEW
some Latin American critics of arguing against
Aunt Julia
pre–
cisely because they had enjoyed reading it. Fashionably alert to
its own narrowing nature as writing,
Aunt Julia
is, of course, a
slip of a book alongside
The Green House;
bUl Vargas Llosa 's
next novel, already crashingly successful in Europe and Latin
America, offers us an apocalyptic panorama under the titl e of
La
guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World).
Capt. Pantoja
and
Aunt Julia
do not indicate a permanent
shrinkage in the Peruvian author; instead, they show him buck–
ling his plots with humor and making much of less.
Whether this has any more to do with hi s reading of Puig
than with his publicized jogging, no one can really tell. As early
as his novella
The Cubs,
Varg-;:Js Llosa let elements of pop cul–
ture, such as song lyrics, reflect the words of his characters and
express the quality as well as the source of their consciousness.
He did not develop this device, however, until
Capt. Pantoja,
which intersected Puig's extensive use of newspaper clippings,
bureaucratic reports, and epistolary colloquialism to achieve
forthright humor and satire as well as plot. To be sure, the device
is neither new nor unique-we can recall Cortazar 's
A Manual
for Manuel
and, microscopically, Joyce's bathetic newspaper
story in "A Painful Case " -but the radical nature of its devel–
opment in Puig and the subsequent radical departure of Vargas
Llosa give it new meaning in the context of Latin American liter–
ature. Vargas Llosa is not abandoning the large seriousness of
his previous work, anymore than Puig is forgetting how to
laugh. Vargas Llosa exhibits flexibility by stepping away from
his notorious "totalizing" attempts, which provoked a North
American reviewer to quip that "Latin Americans don 't so much
write novels as cater them. " Puig's reduction of that big spread
in
Eternal Curse
may follow too much previous dieting, but his
book is fertilely stark and, anyway, not the last he 'll write (two,
as a matter of fact , await translation) while Vargas LIosa 's re–
trenching pleases as it absolves us of the ultimate condescension:
requiring that we find a masterpiece in every work from a cul–
ture that confesses underdevelopment.
RONALD CHRIST
