Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
That is what Contrafactus is all about. In everyday thought, we are constantly manufacturing mental variants on situations we face, ideas we have, or events that happen, and we let some features stay exactly the same while others "slip". What features do we let slip? What ones do we not even consider letting slip? What events are perceived on some deep intuitive level as being close relatives of ones which really happened? What do we think "almost" happened or "could have" happened, even though it unambiguously did not? What alternative versions of events pop without any conscious thought into our minds when we hear a story? Why do some counterfactuals strike us as "less counterfactual" than other counterfactuals? After all, it is obvious that anything that didn't happen didn't happen. There aren't degrees of "didn't-happen-ness". And the same goes for "almost" situations. There are times when one plaintively says, "It almost happened", and other times when one says the same thing, full of relief. But the "almost" lies in the mind, not in the external facts. -DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER/Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidI write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself writing that I was writing and that I was writing that I was writing that I was writing. I can also imagine myself writing that I had already written that I would imagine myself writing that I had written that I was imagining myself writing that I see myself writing that I am writing. -SALVADOR ELIZONDO / The Graphographer (Quoted in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter)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. Camacho’s plot line includes the short stories from the serials created by him. The stories are full of uproariously funny details with a cliffhanger as to how the situation would turn out. The increasingly surreal stories abruptly weaves in and out of the Varguitas plot line as he passionately pursues his aunt and observes Camacho’s mental decline from overwork. This goes in tandem with Varguitas’ and Julia’s increasingly risking family scandal and disapproval.This semi-autobiography is more about his development as a writer than about his affair with his aunt Julia. Varguitas had dreams of being a serious writer of literature, living a bohemian life in a Paris garret. The young writer believed that serious writing should be a descriptive painting of real life. He tried to recreate the humor from situations, such as the hilarity of an actor playing Christ on the cross falling from prop malfunction. Unfortunately, he was unable to recapture the humor of the situation he witnessed. Meanwhile, Camacho was spitting out stories after stories right out of his head, with legions of radio listeners glued to the box. The story ended with the young writer learning a lesson about the need for balance between unlimited creative freedom with the grounding of real life structures. The interesting Russian nesting doll structure effectively paints the internal and self-reflective autobiographical nature of Vargos Llosa’s story, and his relationship with writing. At the outermost, we are reading about his life and his relationship to writing. Vargos Llosa is observing, recalling, and writing about his past with his aunt Julia and his memory of the scriptwriter on which the character of Camacho is based. Pedro Camacho never existed, but Vargos Llosa was inspired by a scriptwriter who wrote for Radio Central in Lima. Vargas Llosa recalled his memory of this scriptwriter, piecing his own observation about himself as a developing young writer, and creating another man, Pedro Camacho, to help tell his semi-autobiography. The character Pedro Camacho, in turn, creates his own characters, which came to life for Camacho and his audience. They became so lifelike that Camacho sweared that they were the one that went out of control on their own, and he had to do damage control. Questions were raised as to what is successful literature. Is literature influential if it inspired ardent followers? Or is literature considered effective if it has high intellectual and artistic significance? The young Varguitas made an informal survey of friends and relatives as to why they like radio serials so much. The answers ranges were “they were entertaining, sad, or dramatic”, and were able to take them out of the drudgery of daily life. Although the people remained glued to the radio for the serials instead of cracking open a book of literature, they demurred that literature is culture while radio serials were only trivial entertainment.“Could have” elements are woven throughout the story. All of Camacho’s stories end with the dramatic questions asking the listeners to wonder how the situation will turn out. Camacho’s short stories are full of hilarious turns, sometimes bordering on the bizarre, with some containing taboo topics. There are situations of sibling incest, the encounter with an African slave that was stowed away on a ship and abandoned in the area, the trial in the rape of a young teen girl, the nervous breakdown of a man who accidentally caused the death of a girl, and a compulsive rat killer. The overworked Camacho eventually mixed up the characters and plots in his serials. He declared that the characters have a life of their own and he was only trying to fix their misbehaviors. His fixing resulted in a hilarious resolution.As a mature writer, Vargas Llosa’s stories contain a balance of real and surreal. They make no moral judgment, but merely depict his observations of real life, mixed in with his creative manipulation of the characters and situations. Although the characters sometimes have immoral qualities and are demoralized, they never are less than human, trying to survive through life’s tragedies and incomprehension, making their sometimes warped interpretations of it. In the end, when Varguitas came to the conclusion that soaps are just as important as high literature, he and Vargas Llosa were able to find the sublime within the plebeian.
Although I eventually got impatient with the pace, there were many things I liked about this book. Our hero, Mario, a lustful 18-year-old, is smitten with Julia, his uncle’s divorced 32-year-old sister-in-law (consistently referred to as “Aunt Julia,” reminding us of their age difference and relationship and cleverly highlighting the absurdity of the situation). The two of them embark on an impossible romance. Meanwhile, Mario is also developing an intellectual fascination with Pedro Camacho, the new scriptwriter at his radio station, an eccentric and manic writer taking Lima by storm with his captivating radio serials and slowly descending into madness in the process.Camacho’s various cliffhanger serials are described in chapters which alternate with the chapters of Mario’s unfolding story. The romance with Julia and waning sanity of the scriptwriter grabbed me the way I imagined these increasingly bizarre serials grabbing the Lima radio audience. Would Mario and Julia’s infatuation last? Will the family find out? Will they get married? Will they break up? Will Camacho’s insanity finally destroy his stories and his career? The constant interruptions of Mario and Julia’s story effectively contributed to the escalating tension, making you feel as if you, too, were following a dramatic radio serial. I found this device very clever.The tongue-in-cheek humor also got me immediately. Quotes like, “I had a job with a pompous-sounding title, a modest salary, duties as a plagiarist, and flexible working hours: News Director of Radio Panamerica” kept me chuckling inwardly as I read. This type of dry wit characterized a lot of the writing. I also got a kick out of Camacho’s quirks as reflected in his serials – his aquiline-nosed heroes, consistently described as “in his fifties, the prime of his life” (as Mario observes, Camacho is a bit defensive about his own quintogenarian age), and his constant gratuitous amusing slams at Argentinians (“…[the police report:] thus inadvertently attributed to the Huanca Salaverrias the habit, so common among inhabitants of Buenos Aires, of attending to their calls of nature in a bucket located in the same room in which they eat and sleep”), evoking blissfully ignored admonitions from Camacho’s superiors to make his heroes younger and to cut the Argentinian-bashing.Other quotes touched me in other ways. At one point, Mario asks himself: “Were all those politicians, attorneys, professors who went by the name of poets, novelists, dramatists really writers, simply because, during brief parentheses in lives in which four fifths of their time was spent at activities having nothing to do with literature, they had produced one slim volume of verses or one niggardly collection of stories? Why should those persons who have used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was nearly illiterate?”I actually ask myself this type of question a lot. When is writing an art, and when is it a craft? Does being a truly gifted writer (or any kind of creative artist) mean you are completely consumed and engulfed by the desire to write? Does it have to mean that? Can you write well if you are uneducated? Can writing effectively for the masses, as opposed to the elite, be a worthy art as well?We also see Mario continually failing as he tries to compose his short stories, while Camacho’s serials enthrall the citizens of Lima. Why? What’s the difference? Why do Camacho’s succeed, and Mario’s fail? Is it talent? Marketability? Passion for, even obsession with, writing as opposed to dabbling? Admittedly, exploring the art of writing wasn’t an obvious focus of the novel; yet these questions stimulated me as I read.As you can see, I enjoyed the book a lot. Initially, I alternated between feeling captivated by Mario and Julia’s romance and being equally drawn into the accounts of the tawdry, tabloid-esque radio serials despite myself. Every time I started a new chapter with its new focus, I actually wished the old one weren’t ending. This is a pretty impressive feat. Despite this, I think the book should have been significantly shorter. Eventually, I started to get tired of being pulled into yet another serial and wished the story of Mario and Julia would just come to a head already. At that point, I still had 100-odd pages left ‘till the end. Interestingly enough, I felt this way (although proportionately more so) when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, another South American novel. I found One Hundred Years of Solitude funny and engaging at first, and then at about the halfway point it suddenly got old. Aunt Julia, at least, kept me going about 2/3 of the way before I started skimming just to see what would happen, which I guess is an improvement. But 5 stars is not an option for a book that I found myself tiring of 2/3 of the way through.As I wrote the above, about 50 pages from the end, I wavered between 3 and 4 stars and decided it would depend on the ending. Hence the 3 stars -- I found the ending rushed after a slow unfolding and extremely anticlimactic. I wish I could give it 3.5, though, because this book had some great moments and would have deserved at least 4 stars had Vargas-Llosa simply known when to stop.
What do You think about Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter (1995)?
Mario is eighteen and living in Lima, Peru, in the 1950s. He lives with his grandparents (his parents live in the U.S.); is studying law to make his large family happy (they expect Mario to amount to something); aspires to be a full-time writer; and works at Radio Panamericana as the chief news editor - which involves reading newspapers, selecting stories and plagiarising them for the hourly bulletins. Helping him at this task is Pascual, who likes to put grisly stories of multiple deaths in the newscasts, even if they're weeks old, whenever Mario isn't around - which is frequently, as he spends most of his time at cafes with his friend Javier; at Panamericana's sister radio station, Radio Central, next door; or having lunch with his Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga.It is while at their home for lunch one Thursday that Mario first meets Aunt Julia, thirty-two years old, divorced, and recently arrived from Bolivia. She is Aunt Olga's sister, and she still refers to Mario as a kid, which he hates. All that changes one night when they go out dancing and Mario kisses her, beginning a long and involved but very innocent love affair.Meanwhile, at Radio Central - the station that appeals to the masses, while Panamericana is considered "high brow" - the owners, Genaro Sr. and Genaro Jr., are having trouble finding scripts for the serials that air on the station. They've been buying them - often damaged and with missing pages - from CMQ in Cuba, but that country is undergoing political upheaval and they can no longer get the serials. On a stroke of genius, they hire a Bolivian scriptwriter called Pedro Camacho. Pedro Camacho is almost dwarf-like, has no sense of humour, hates Argentines, and lives like a pauper while he writes an impressive amount of scripts, from four to ten a day. They are immensely popular and draw such large audiences the Genaros are soon able to raise their advertising prices. When Mario first meets Pedro Camacho, it's when the small man is taking Mario's typewriter, even though he can't lift the Remmington on his own. But soon Mario becomes his only friend, and it is to Mario that the Genaro's turn whenever there's a problem that they need to tell Pedro Camacho about. Which happens eventually, when characters from the serials start turning up in other serials, when their occupations keep switching, and everyone wonders if Pedro Camacho has lost it or if he's working towards some kind of mastermind work. The public is divided, but complaints keep coming in.As things become serious with Mario and Aunt Julia, so do things take a turn for the worse at Radio Central. Based partly on the author's real-life first marriage to Julia Urquidi, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is also a satire of Peru's radio serials; the two themes run parallel to each other throughout the story, with each chapter of Mario's life alternating with one of Pedro Camacho's serials.I have very conflicting thoughts and feelings regarding this novel. I was impressed by it, it's entertaining, often funny, and quite clever. But at a dense 410 pages, it took me forever to read and several times I wondered if it were ever going to end. In fact, I had to skip over the last two serials in order to finish it - I hate doing that but I had reached a point (the halfway point, in fact), where it was like trying to swim against a strong current. Progress was minimal. The Mario and Julia chapters read a lot faster and ... easier, than the soap operas, as entertaining as they are. By the time I finally ended, I was just pleased to have finally finished it. Because of that reading experience, I find myself with little to say about the novel itself.It was a fascinating glimpse into life in Lima in the 50s (it was first published in 1977), though also one with a narrowly-focused scope, being primarily concerned with family and enterprise. What Peru and Lima were like in the 50s in terms of politics, economics, social issues etc., I know nothing: that wasn't what the book was about, though there are sometimes glimpses, especially economic. Through Pedro Camacho - who, it turns out, was married to a grossly fat and bossy Argentine woman, a singer and a whore according to others - there are several ethnic stereotypes and cultural prejudices in his serials, and when Mario, Aunt Julia, Javier and Pascual scour Peru looking for someone to marry the couple even though he's under age and she's divorced, we get an astute and oft-times ironic look at rural peasant life.In truth, the many soap operas included in the novel serve as a distraction from the fact that very little happens in this slow-moving story. Also, my preoccupation with how slowly I was moving through the story served as a distraction from what Llosa was really writing about: Two men struggling, in a way, with their passions, their loyalty and their dedication. There is quite possibly something going on with how women are portrayed, but since it's set in the 50s I doubt it's a social commentary and more something akin to historical (and cultural) accuracy, about which I can't really speak.I have to hand it Llosa, though: he has an impressive imagination, since through his character of Pedro Camacho, he juggled multiple story-lines and characters, and seemed to have had a lot of fun later mixing them up. Also, the soap operas themselves were often quite disturbing and really stick in your head: the first is about a young man who has an incestuous relationship with his sister, who faints on her wedding day and her uncle discovers she's pregnant, only her new husband knows nothing about it. Another is about a man obsessed with exterminating vermin, especially rats, ever since rats ate his baby sister alive while he was asleep and responsible for her (that one especially made me want to run into my baby boy's room and make sure there was nothing nibbling on him!); it ends with his family, which he's been repressing, turning on him en masse like rats. And so on. I found it hard to believe that anyone could write these serials in an hour - using just their index fingers to type, no less. I'm also not sure how they translated to the airwaves, as there's barely any dialogue in the serial chapters but obviously, the actors have to perform them mostly through conversation. So there is a small degree of suspending disbelief at work.Overall, I found it very interesting, well-written, humorous, clever, but way too slow to actually enjoy. Readers who like to savour words and take their time would probably have better luck with this than I did. I'm all for appreciating prose, but not at eight pages a day.
—Shannon (Giraffe Days)
The singly most promising and disappointing book I've ever read. Fraught with genius and absolute failure. The episodic serial scripts which comprise every other chapter are astounding in their creativity and execution. When Mr. Llosa tries to render a real(and semi-autobiographical) relationship with his Aunt Julia his skills crumble into sophomoric platitudes that reveal his inability to actually love a woman romantically (whether it be in his own life or as a writer.)There are so many laugh-o
—Frank
Hacía tiempo que no leía una novela que me fascinara tanto... La tía Julia y el escribidor es una de esas novelas que despiertan las ganas de escibir, tanto por su protagonista, un jovencito que desea ser escritor (alter ego del mismo Vargas Llosa) y se enamora de una tía política aún joven (treinta y pocos), como por el escribidor, Pedro Camacho, un guionista de radioteatros con una creatividad increíble para los melodramas truculentos.Creo que perdí un poco de objetividad, ya que la novela la terminé hace un tiempo y no escribí mis impresiones inmediatamente, pero lo que sí destaco de la historia es su ritmo: la historia principal, la historia de Mario, el joven protoescritor, narrada en primera persona, ocupa los capítulos impares, mientras los capítulos pares son ocupados por los relatos de radioteatro de Pedro Camacho. Esto le da gran agilidad e interés a la lectura, ya que los dos hilos son igual de envolventes, con la diferencia que los radioteatros de Camacho nunca concluyen, sino que cierran con un enganche para el "capítulo siguiente", lo que genera una frustrante y a la vez deliciosa sensación de "coitus interruptus".Es una historia de juventud y vejez, de cómo se enfrentan la juventud con la madurez y la decadencia, y de cómo la enfrentan algunos: mientras la tía Julia, una divorciada joven sin hijos, se enfrenta a la vejez inminente con dignidad, conciencia de la muerte y alegría (ella desea seguir disfrutando de la vida, aunque la sociedad conservadora la mire como una loca), Pedro Camacho intenta ignorar la decadencia, insistiendo en que la cincuentena es "la flor de la vida", y tratando de desviar la mirada cada vez que la decadencia le recuerda su mortalidad.[SPOILER]El crecimiento y juventud también se vive a través de nuestro protagonista, que se inicia en los primeros pasos de la escritura, y Camacho, quien vive un decaimiento progresivo en su habilidad para escribir. Esto llevará a Camacho a a mezclar historias y situaciones hasta el punto que sus radioteatros, antes los más escuchados e influyentes de todo Perú, se conviertan en objeto de burla. Así, mientras Mario vive su primer amor y triunfa tanto contra las presiones familiares y los prejuicios de la clase media de los años 1950 como contra el frustrante proceso de decepciones que es la escritura, Camacho acaba en un sanatorio mental primero y luego como estafeta en una revista de mala muerte, con todo su antiguo orgullo pisoteado por el patetismo de la decadencia.[/SPOILER]Camacho es una parodia de sus propias palabras: los protagonistas de sus radioteatros son todos "hombres que habían llegado a la flor de la edad, la cincuentena: frente ancha, nariz aguileña, mirada penetrante, rectitud y bondad en el espíritu". Camacho es, por el contrario, un hombre bajo, desconectado del mundo, con grandes dificultades para adaptarse a los cambios, incluso a los de su propio cuerpo y mente. Aún así, Camacho debe ser uno de los personajes más fascinantes de la literatura latinoamericana: con sus prejuicios (los argentinos siempre aparecen como personas sucias, brutas, incivilizadas y crueles), su tozudez (sólo había una forma de escribir), su clasismo intelectualoide (los actores eran incapaces de contribuir al proceso creativo porque no eran artistas como él), su rigidez militar (tenía totalmente disciplinados a todos los trabajadores y actores del radioteatro), Camacho es al mismo tiempo una parodia y un retrato muy digno de un pequeño dictador del arte, un director de orquesta obsesivo y autista, que tiene un don que él mismo no comprende y que sería incapaz de recuperar si es que llegara a perder.El idilio amoroso de Mario y la tía Julia es igual de entretenido, pero lo cierto es que la épica del amor se queda pequeña ante la épica de la decadencia. Pero, pese a que Camacho se devora la historia, el romance de Mario y la tía Julia sale dignamente parado, principalmente porque sus protagonistas viven un equilibrio entre astucia y locura, entre valentía y conciencia de la muerte, y la figura del padre de Mario -un ser gris que sólo aparece hacia el final de la historia, pero que impone su peso a lo largo de todo el relato- genera una empatía especial con el narrador-protagonista.Para cerrar, se trata de un imprescindible de la literatura latinoamericana, que me gustaría releer en algunos años más, cuando tenga más tiempo y haya olvidado un poco la historia.
—Jorge
