|
The Bad Girl: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Creator: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy Used: $4.10
You Save: $20.90 (84%)
New (46) Used (34) Collectible (2) from $4.10
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 134194
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0374182434
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780374182434
ASIN: 0374182434
Publication Date: October 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as “Lily” in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting “Comrade Arlette,” an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit n icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the ily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as—whether t’s Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO fficial, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman—and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.
The protean Lily, gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse—does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear s what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate hadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In MarioVargas Llosa’s beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
An enjoyable romp through the world September 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This novel paints a panoramic history of four decades of South American and European life as the story traces Ricardo's love for "the bad girl." The characters are not particularly complex, and I never really believed the love story, but I really enjoyed the romp through the world.
 Dissapointed by "The Bad Girl" August 13, 2008
A South American critic wrote of Mario Vargas Llosa, many years ago, as essentially a naturalist and phenomenologist - that is, a writer who considers characterization as secondary to illuminating the sweep of historical and political events. Read (if you haven't already) Llosa'a thrilling and vital "Feast of the Goat" and compare it to the lifeless "The Bad Girl". Emerging from his fictionalized history of the assassination of the Dominican Republic's brutal strongman, Rafael Trujillo, are a host of memorably drawn characters that come to live within the reader as well as within the pages of "Feast of the Goat". The book's characters - Trujillo himself, Johnny Abbes, the slimy head of internal security for the regime, General Pupo Roman, the dignified general whose moment of personal weakness leads inexorably to personal tragedy for him, his family and his fellow anti-Trujillo collaborators in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, "Egghead" Cabral, the weak intellectual who attempts to sexually sacrifice his daughter to Trujillo as a means of staying in favor within the regime - are beautifully and organically defined within the contexts and confines of this specific political history.
In "The Bad Girl" Llosa, taking a cue from his literary idol Gustave Flaubert, comes at his main characters head on, this time trying to subordinate history - Lima, London and Paris during the 1960's and 70's - to the greater, more intense reality of the story's central characters, or as Flaubert might have said, sovereign identities. The experiment (for Llosa) fails, this book is no Madame Bovary. The breathtakingly shallow and insipid lovers, Lily (the Bad Girl) and Ricardo, her fellow Peruvian, a professional translator living out his "dream" life in Paris, seem to blur, as the book progresses, further and further into indistinctiveness and numbing repetition. When lovers within a novel repeat their silly nicknames to each other on seemingly every other page, we know the author's in trouble with his or her book. And in this book, the badder the bad girl becomes the less we sympathize with her, and it's the same in reverse for good Ricardo. The more Ricardo tolerates and absolves Lily of her sexual cruelty, the more we distance ourselves from Ricardo. What in this world, we may ask, would lead someone to love a woman who is paid and protected to fart into the face of her sadistic Japanese gangster boyfriend? Answer: someone acting under static compulsion rather than from a vital source of human energy. And why does this sexual adventuress (hailed by the idiot newspaper reviewers as a symbol of female liberation) keep returning to a man whose sole preoccupations appear to revolve around saving enough money to buy a tiny Paris apartment and running off, every week, to provide translation at yet another boring bureaucratic event? As for the story's historical backdrop, Llosa never seems to engage an era of otherwise tumultuous revolutionary events. Early in the book Llosa misidentifies the era of a promiscuous painter's death from AIDS as the early 1970's. Paris, city of lights and love and all kinds of intellectual ferment is elicited by Llosa, through the eyes of Ricardo, as little more than an accumulation of the city's street names. There is, happily, a familiar return to artistic form for this great writer at the end of the novel. Ravaged, predictably, by a deadly disease, Lily is tenderly cared for by Ricardo until her imminent release into death. Within these quiet, dignified final scenes of the book, we are moved by the powerful pathos of fulfilled domestic responsibilities. We are, at last and for a fleeting moment, reminded of Flaubert.
 a very good book from a real talent June 16, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Llosa once again showcases his amazing talent. The guy can switch between genres as effortlessly as you & I change shirts. Very good novel. Get it, won't be disappointed.
The Bad Book June 14, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is a Romance with no romance and a Love Story with no love. Some parts are well written, and others seem like they were written in a Freshman Composition class. Now I am reading Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and I am much happier.
A post-modern Bovary... April 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My book club read "The Bad Girl" and its inspiration, "Madame Bovary" by Flaubert. Mario Vargas Llosa has updated the French classic in a way that at first glance might seem unclear. How is the protean protagonist (who goes by many names and guises) similar to Emma Bovary? Emma was provincial and doomed by the tightly controlled times in which she lived, the girl in this novel (set in '60s and '70s) travels the world, has many lovers and husbands, and seems to have far more control over her life. For a while, it seems the narrator, who is doomed to love the bad girl for his whole life, is the tragic figure.
It is a worthwhile exercise to read this book and "Bovary" together. I recommend reading Flaubert first. His novel is surprisingly readable, and a revealing look at the pre-feminist world. Vargas Llosa seems to be deconstructing feminism a bit... do women really have more choices today or are they just doomed to gain power through sexuality? The bad girl, despite more freedom, has moments of sexual humiliation that might make you wonder about her control over her own life.
What the novels have in common is an strong anti-passion theme. Characters driven my their passions, held hostage by them, do not fare well in the narrative. By contrast, the more reasoned and dispassionate characters fare better. Whether deliberately or not, both novels seem influenced by orthodox Christian attitudes about temperence and prudence. I also think Vargas Llosa is doing a postmodern deconstruction of feminism and sexuality and coming up with less than a full endorsement of either.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
