Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

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The story is set in the Lima of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. urn:oclc:872618977 Scandate 20100408194142 Scanner scribe12.sfdowntown.archive.org Scanningcenter sfdowntown Source for writing, he says, ''dawns with the sun and gradually grows warmer along with it. ... I begin to write at first light. By noon, my brain is a blazing torch. Then the fire dies down little by little, and around about dusk I Meanwhile, Pedro Camacho’s soap operas make him the toast of Lima: The stories and the fortunes of their characters are on everyone’s lips when Camacho begins to evidence signs of fatigue and then madness. His villains all turn out to be Argentines or Peruvians with Argentinian proclivities. Despite official protests to Radio Panamerica by the Argentine ambassador, Camacho persists in vilifying Argentina and its people. Far more serious is the growing bewilderment among his listeners: Characters who died in one serial are resurrected in another, sometimes with different professions; other characters move in and out of several serials; still others change their names in mid-script. Public confusion and dismay grow as, one by one, the principal continuing characters are killed off in one catastrophe after another until, after a series of disasters, each worse than the one before, all of fictional Lima is destroyed cataclysmically, and Camacho is finally committed to an insane asylum. This is novel of two lives, both at critical junctures, told in two vastly different formats. The first, semi-autobiographical, is the story of an aspiring young writer, Marito, and his courtship of his aunt by marriage. The second is the story of Pedro Camacho, an acclaimed radio scriptwriter, as he falls apart under the stress of writing ten different radio serials simultaneously.

The story of the furtive courtship between Mario and Julia is the central portion of Mario’s narrative, as the two fall quite hopelessly, passionately, and madly in love with each other. Their love, when it is finally discovered after their ill-starred elopement, brings down upon them a family catastrophe that competes, in all of its absurdity and odd manifestations, with elements of Camacho’s soap operas, the stories which are recounted antiphonally throughout the novel. Indeed, the comedy of errors of their elopement—they dash about the countryside to find a mayor who will, for a bribe, marry the underage Mario without parental consent—has exactly enough improbability about it to make it truly resemble the vicissitudes of real life. So does life often resemble bad literature and B-pictures. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a humorous surreal novel by Mario Vargos Llosa, the Peruvian writer who is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The story’s structure is like a Russian nesting doll and its variants. It contains two main plot lines. The first is the realistic anchor of the 18 year old Varguitas (diminutive for Vargos) falling for his 32 year old divorced aunt by marriage, Julia. The story anchor is based on the author’s memory of his youth passionately pursuing his decade older aunt, Julia Urquidi Illanes. The second follows an obsessive Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, hired by the station Varguitas works for, to churn out numerous soap serials daily. In his interview, Vargas Llosa said that although Pedro Camacho is not a real person, he was based on a man Llosa knew who wrote radio serials for Radio Central in Lima. The man would churn out countless scripts with ease, barely taking time to review them. The man was the first professional writer Llosa has known. Llosa was fascinated with the unlimited world the man was able to create. One day, the man’s stories started to overlap, with the plots and characters getting mixed up. This inspired Vargas Llosa’s main theme. It took me a while to understand exactly what was going on and maybe the novel is a bit longer than it needed to be, but in the end I really enjoyed it. The GR blurb calls it masterfully done, hilarious, mischievous, and a classic, and I agree. Most of the time, so-called heartaches et cetera are simply indigestion – tough beans that won't dissolve in the stomach, fish that's not as fresh as it should be, constipation. A good laxative blasts the folly of love to bits.of important Latin American novels to appear within the past year, the previous being Ernesto Sabato's ''On Heroes and Tombs.'') Mario e un tânăr de 18 ani, redactor de știri la Radio Panamericana. La postul de radio vecin, Radio Central (posturi de radio surori), se dă, în schimb, mai mult teatru radiofonic, foarte popular în rândul ascultătorilor, într-un timp în care nu existau încă televizoare. Teatrul radiofonic serializat e un fel de precursor al telenovelelor latino-americane.

Lccn 82005159 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Openlibrary_edition Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station, Panamericana, writing news bulletins alongside the disaster-obsessed Pascual. Mario has an aunt (married to a biological uncle) whose sister, Julia, has just been divorced and has come to live with some of his family members. He frequently sees her and though at first they do not get on, they start to go to movies together and gradually become romantically involved, ultimately getting married.

Mario and Julia’s story ends up pretty wildly too, until the great crescendo, after which everything quietens down but is never the same again. The eighteen-year-old youth gets infatuated with his aunt… He is a main hero and narrator of the story…