Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa

'This is a novel as full of fizz as a giant pack of sherbet, witty, wise and wonderful in equal proportions. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is as tense as a thriller and as racy as a romance. The fertility – and autonomy – of this world of words are as dangerous as they are delightful. The result is very funny indeed. It is also unexpectedly profound. Magic realism attempts to tell us things about ourselves by incorporating the fantastic in the literal. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter pulls off that South American rope-trick with unprecedented power and skill.' SUNDAY TIMES

'A comic novel on the grand scale written with tremendous confidence and verve. Mario, 18-year-old law student and radio news-editor, falls scandalously for his Aunt Julia, the 32-year-old divorced wife of a cousin, and the progressively lunatic story of this affair is interwoven with episodes from a series of radio soap-operas written by his friend Pedro Camacho, a scriptwriter of prodigious output and hysterical imagination who sprinkles his work liberally with his own prejudices. Llosa’s huge energy and inventiveness is extravagant and fabulously funny. The scale and humour and grasp of Llosa, like those of Marquez, are immensely refreshing.' NEW STATESMAN

'Aunt Julia is a complex, challenging novel which explores the tragicomic relationship between two artists and their material. While each feeds off the other, the narratives of Mario are nourished by the life around him, those of Camacho by the fantasies engendered by his disintegrating mind. Vargas Llosa’s skill in weaving such different perceptions of the world into a single image is only fully apparent at the end. It is a tribute to his imagination that one is left haunted by this portrait of Peruvian society; a portrait which never fails to show, beneath the drizzle and mists of Lima, the real lives and slightly surreal aspirations of its people.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

'It is a novel of immense vitality and imagination, and it will confirm the opinion of all those who think that the Latin-American novel is the most vigorous contemporary literary form at present. Out of the turmoils of South American countries have come works of art which challenge the imagination and show us new relationships between psychic drives and social reality. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is as brilliant an example of the genre as any, and has also a life completely its own.' LITERARY REVIEW