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The Way to Paradise: A Novel Paperback – September 1, 2004
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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A New York Times Notable Book
Flora Tristán, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return in 1844, she makes her name as a champion of the downtrodden, touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union.
In 1891, Flora's grandson, struggling painter and stubborn visionary Paul Gauguin, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.
Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this double portrait, a rare study in passion and ambition, as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death.
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2004
- Dimensions5.5 x 1.04 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100312424035
- ISBN-13978-0312424039
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The bold, dynamic and endlessly productive imagination of Vargas Llosa, one of the writing giants of our time, is something truly to be admired...In this, the master novelist's first truly international novel, the canvases light up with the glow of his passion.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
“Oddly affecting...an engrossing, sometimes horrifying image of social conditions in France [from] one of the great Latin American novelists.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“With matchless empathy and insight, the great author analyzes two contrasting quests for the ideal...It's hard to believe, but Vargas Llosa just keeps getting better. What are the Swedes waiting for?” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Through his characters Vargas Llosa [captures] much of the liberationist spirit of the 19th century, the great romantic desire to escape the cramping bonds of tradition, whatever the cost. His stylistic virtuosity with authorial voice commands ambition.” ―Washington Post
“Masterful....Vargas Llosa's florid but exacting style is mesmerizing, as is his choice of two characters whose drastically opposing belief systems only make their rare moments of connection more sublime.” ―Time Out New York
About the Author
Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Way to Paradise
By Mario Vargas Llosa, Natasha WimmerPicador
Copyright © 2003 Mario Vargas LlosaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-42403-9
Contents
1 Flora in Auxerre,2 The Spirit of the Dead Watches,
3 Bastard and Fugitive,
4 Mysterious Waters,
5 The Shadow of Charles Fourier,
6 Annah from Java,
7 News from Peru,
8 Portrait of Aline Gauguin,
9 The Crossing,
10 Nevermore,
11 Arequipa,
12 What Are We?,
13 The Nun Gutiérrez,
14 Wrestling with the Angel,
15 The Battle of Cangallo,
16 The House of Pleasure,
17 Words to Change the World,
18 The Late-Blooming Vice,
19 The Monster-City,
20 The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa,
21 The Last Battle,
22 Pink Horses,
CHAPTER 1
Flora in Auxerre
April 1844
* * *
She opened her eyes at four in the morning and thought, Today you begin to change the world, Florita. Undaunted by the prospect of setting in motion the machinery that in a matter of years would transform humanity and eliminate injustice, she felt calm, strong enough to face the obstacles ahead of her. It was the same way she had felt on that afternoon in Saint-Germain ten years ago, at her first meeting of Saint-Simonians, when she listened to Prosper Enfantin describe the messianic couple who would save the world and vowed to herself, You'll be that Woman-Messiah. Poor Saint-Simonians, with their elaborate hierarchies, their fanatical love of science, their belief that progress could be made simply by putting industrialists in government and running society like a business! You had left them far behind, Andalusa.
Unhurriedly, she got up, washed, and dressed. The night before, after the painter Jules Laure visited to wish her luck on her tour, she had finished packing her bags and, with the help of Marie-Madeleine, the maid, and the water-seller Noël Taphanel, moved them to the foot of the stairs. She herself had carried the freshly printed copies of The Workers' Union, stopping every few steps to catch her breath because the sack was so heavy. When the carriage arrived at the house on the rue du Bac to take her to the wharf, Flora had been up for hours.
It was still the dead of night. The gas lamps on the corners had been extinguished, and the coachman, buried in a cloak so that only his eyes were visible, urged the horses on with a whistle of his whip. As she listened to the tolling of the bells of Saint-Sulpice, the streets, dark and lonely, seemed ghostly to her. But on the banks of the Seine, the wharf swarmed with passengers, sailors, and porters preparing for departure. She heard orders and shouts. When the ship set sail, trailing a foamy wake in the brown waters of the river, the sun was shining in a spring sky and Flora sat drinking hot tea in her cabin. Wasting no time, she noted the date in her diary: April 12, 1844. And at once she began to study her travel companions. You would reach Auxerre by dusk, so you had twelve hours in this floating specimen case to expand your knowledge of rich and poor, Florita.
Few of the travelers were bourgeois. Many were sailors off the boats that carried the agricultural produce of Joigny and Auxerre to Paris, and were now on their way home. They were gathered around their master, a hairy, gruff, redheaded man in his fifties, with whom Flora had a friendly exchange. Sitting on deck surrounded by his men, at nine in the morning the master gave each man as much bread as he could eat, seven or eight radishes, a pinch of salt, two hard-boiled eggs, and, in a tin cup passed from hand to hand, a swallow of wine. These freight sailors earned a franc and a half for a day of labor; over the long winters, they barely scraped by. Their work in the open air was hard when the weather was rainy. But in the relationship of the men with their master, Flora saw none of the servility of the English sailors, who hardly dared meet the eyes of their superiors. At three in the afternoon, the master served them their last meal of the day: slices of ham, cheese, and bread, which they ate in silence, sitting in a circle.
In the port at Auxerre, it took an infernally long time for the baggage to be unloaded. The locksmith Pierre Moreau had made a reservation for her at an old inn in the center of town, and she arrived there early in the morning. Day was dawning as she unpacked. She got into bed knowing she wouldn't sleep a wink. But for the first time in a long while, during the few hours that she lay watching the light grow through the cretonne curtains, she didn't daydream about her mission, the suffering of humanity, or the workers she would recruit for the Workers' Union. She thought instead about the house where she was born, in Vaugirard, on the outskirts of Paris, a neighborhood of the bourgeoisie whom she now detested. Were you remembering the house itself — spacious, comfortable, with its manicured gardens and busy maids — or the descriptions of it your mother gave when you were no longer rich but poor, the flattering memories in which the unhappy woman took refuge from the leaks, disarray, clutter, and ugliness of those two little rooms on the rue du Fouarre? You and your mother were forced to move there after the authorities seized the Vaugirard house, claiming that your, parents' marriage, performed in Bilbao by a French expatriate priest, wasn't valid, and that Mariano Tristán, Spanish citizen from Peru, belonged to a country with which France was at war.
Most likely, Florita, your memory preserved only what your mother had told you of those early years. You were too little to remember the gardeners, the maids, the furniture upholstered in silk and velvet, the heavy draperies, the silver, gold, crystal, and painted china that adorned the salon and the dining room. Madame Tristán fled into the splendid past of Vaugirard so as not to see the poverty and misery of the foul-smelling place Maubert, crowded with beggars, vagabonds, and lowlifes, or the rue du Fouarre, full of taverns, where you spent several years of your childhood — those years you remembered well. Carrying basins of water up and down, carrying sacks of rubbish up and down. Afraid of meeting, on the worn, creaky steps of the steep little staircase, that old drunkard with the purple face and swollen nose, Uncle Giuseppe, a man with wandering hands who sullied you with his gaze and sometimes pinched you. Years of scarcity, fear, hunger, sadness, especially when your mother fell into stunned silence, unable to accept such misfortune after having lived like a queen with her husband — her legitimate husband before God, no matter what anyone said — Don Mariano Tristán y Moscoso, a colonel of the Armies of the King of Spain who died prematurely of apoplexy on June 4, 1807, when you were barely four years and two months old.
It was just as unlikely that you would remember your father. The full face, the heavy eyebrows, the curly mustache, the faintly rosy skin, the ringed fingers, the long gray sideburns of Mariano Tristán that came to your memory weren't those of the flesh-and-blood father who carried you in his arms to watch the butterflies flutter among the flowers of the gardens of Vaugirard, and sometimes offered to give you your bottle; the man who spent hours in his study reading chronicles of French travelers in Peru; the Don Mariano who was visited by the young Simón Bolívar, future Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. It was the Mariano Tristán of the portrait your mother kept on her night table in the tiny apartment on the rue du Fouarre; the Don Mariano of the oil paintings hanging in the Tristán family house on Calle Santo Domingo in Arequipa, paintings that you spent hours studying until you were convinced that that handsome, elegant, prosperous-looking gentleman was your father.
The first morning noises began to rise from the streets of Auxerre, and Flora knew sleep had fled for good. Her appointments began at nine. She had arranged several, thanks to Moreau, the locksmith, and the good Agricol Perdiguier's letters of introduction, addressed to his friends at the workers' mutual aid societies of the region. But you had time. A few moments longer in bed would give you strength to rise to the circumstances, Andalusa.
What if Colonel Mariano Tristán had lived many years more? You'd never have known poverty, Florita. Thanks to a good dowry, you'd be married to a bourgeois, and maybe you'd be living in a beautiful Vaugirard mansion, surrounded by gardens. You'd have no idea what it was like to go to bed with your insides twisted by hunger; you wouldn't know the meaning of such concepts as discrimination and exploitation. Injustice would be an abstract term. But perhaps your parents would have given you an education — schooling, teachers, a tutor. Though they might not have: a girl from a good family was educated only in order to win a husband and learn to be a good mother and housewife. You'd have no knowledge of any of the things necessity had forced you to learn. True, you wouldn't make the spelling mistakes that had embarrassed you all your life, and doubtless you'd have read more books. You would spend the years occupying yourself with your wardrobe, caring for your hands, your eyes, your hair, your figure, living a worldly life of soirees, dances, plays, teas, excursions, flirtations. You'd be a lovely parasite burrowed deep into your good marriage. Never would you seek to discover what the world was like beyond your sheltered existence in the shadow of your father, your mother, your husband, your children. A machine for giving birth, a contented slave, you'd go to church on Sundays, to confession on the first Friday of every month, and now, at forty-one, you'd be a plump matron with an irresistible passion for chocolate and novenas. You would never have traveled to Peru, or seen England, or discovered pleasure in the arms of Olympia, or written the books that you've written despite your poor spelling. And, of course, you would never have become conscious of the slavery of women, nor would it have occurred to you that in order for women to be liberated it was necessary for them to unite with other exploited peoples and wage a peaceful revolution — as crucial for the future of humanity as the emergence of Christianity 1,844 years ago. "It was better you died, mon cher papa," she said, laughing, as she leaped out of bed. She wasn't tired. For twenty-four hours she had felt no pains in her back or womb, nor had she noticed the cold presence in her chest. You were in great spirits, Florita.
The first meeting, at nine in the morning, took place in a workshop. The locksmith, Moreau, who was supposed to accompany her, had had to leave Auxerre urgently because of a death in the family. You were on your own, Andalusa. As planned, the gathering drew some thirty members of one of the associations into which the mutual aid societies of Auxerre had split, a group with the lovely name of Duty to Be Free. These members, almost all shoemakers, greeted her with wary, uncomfortable glances, one or two mocking, when they realized their visitor was a woman. She had become accustomed to receptions like this ever since, months ago, she had begun to present her ideas about the Workers' Union to small groups in Paris and Bordeaux. When she spoke she kept her voice steady, feigning more confidence than she possessed. The distrust of her listeners gradually evaporated as she explained how, by uniting, workers could get what they yearned for — the right to work, education, health, decent living conditions — while so long as they were scattered they would always be mistreated by the rich and those in power. All murmured their assent when, in support of her ideas, she made reference to What Is Property?, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's controversial book, which had prompted so much talk in Paris since its appearance four years before, with its emphatic assertion that property is theft. Two of those present, who seemed to be followers of Charles Fourier, had come ready to attack her, with arguments Flora had heard before from Agricol Perdiguier. If workers had to subtract a few francs from their miserable salaries to contribute to the Workers' Union, how would they feed their children? She responded patiently to all their objections. At least as far as contributions were concerned, she thought they allowed themselves to be convinced. But their resistance was stubborn on the question of marriage.
"You attack the family and want it to disappear. That isn't Christian, madame."
"Indeed it is," she replied, on the verge of losing her temper. But she softened her voice. "What isn't Christian is when a man buys himself a woman, turns her into a child-bearing machine and beast of burden, and on top of it all beats her senseless each time he has too much to drink — all in the name of the sanctity of the family."
When she realized that they were staring at her wide-eyed, in dismay, she suggested that they change the subject and instead imagine together the advantages that the Workers' Union would bring peasants, craftsmen, and workers like themselves. For example, the Workers' Palaces — modern, clean, airy buildings where their children would be educated and their families treated by good doctors and nurses when they were in need of care or had been injured at work. When their strength failed, or they were too old for the workshop, they would retire to these welcoming homes to rest. The dull and tired eyes gazing at her grew livelier, began to shine. Wasn't it worthwhile to sacrifice a small part of their wages in exchange for such gains? Some listeners nodded.
How ignorant, how foolish, how egotistical so many of them were. She realized this when, after answering their questions, she began to interrogate them. They knew nothing, they were completely lacking in curiosity, and they were content with their animal lives. It was an uphill battle to get them to devote any of their time or energy to fighting for their sisters and brothers. Exploitation and poverty had made them stupid. Sometimes it was tempting to believe that Saint-Simon was right, Florita: the people were incapable of saving themselves; only an elite could manage it. They had even been infected with bourgeois prejudices: it was hard for them to accept that it should be a woman — a woman! — who was urging them to take action. The cleverest and most outspoken of them were unbearably arrogant — they put on aristocratic airs — and Flora had to make an effort not to explode. She had sworn to herself that for the year her tour of France lasted, she would give no cause, not ever, to deserve the nickname Madame-la-Colère, which she was sometimes called by Jules Laure and other friends because of her outbursts. In the end, the thirty shoemakers promised to join the Workers' Union and tell the carpenters, locksmiths, and stonecutters in the Duty to Be Free society what they had heard that morning.
As she was returning to the inn along the winding cobbled streets of Auxerre, she saw in a little square where four poplars were growing, their leaves very new and white, a group of girls playing, making and unmaking patterns as they ran about. She stopped to watch them. They were playing the game called Paradise, which, according to your mother, you used to play in the gardens of Vaugirard with other little girls from the neighborhood, under the smiling gaze of Mariano Tristán. Did you remember, Florita? "Is this the way to Paradise?" "No, miss, try the next corner." And as the girl ran from corner to corner seeking the elusive Paradise, the others amused themselves by changing places behind her back. She remembered the surprise she felt one day in Arequipa in 1833, near the church of La Merced, when all of a sudden she came upon a group of boys and girls running around the courtyard of a big house. "Is this the way to Paradise?" "Try the next corner, sir." The game you thought was French turned out to be Peruvian too. And why not? Didn't everyone dream of reaching Paradise? She had taught the game to her two children, Aline and Ernest.
For each town and city, she had set herself a strict schedule: meetings with workers, the newspapers, the most influential landowners and industrialists, and, of course, church authorities. She would explain to her bourgeois listeners that, contrary to what was said, her project heralded not civil war but rather a bloodless revolution, Christian at its roots, inspired by love and brotherhood. And that the Workers' Union, in bringing liberty and justice to the poor and to women, would in fact prevent violent outbursts, inevitable in France if things continued as they had gone on so far. How long would a handful of the privileged keep growing fat at the expense of the poor? How long would slavery, abolished for men, persist for women? She knew how to be persuasive; her arguments would convince many bourgeois and priests.
But in Auxerre she couldn't visit a newspaper, because there weren't any. A city of twelve thousand, and no newspaper. The crass ignorance of the local bourgeoisie was remarkable.
At the cathedral, she had a conversation that ended in a fight with the parish priest, Father Fortin, a fat, balding little man with fearful eyes, foul breath, and a greasy cassock, whose narrowmindedness managed to infuriate her. ("Temper, Florita.")
She went to see Father Fortin at his house, next door to the cathedral, and noted how big it was and how well furnished. The maid, an old woman in a cap and apron, limped ahead of her to the priest's office. He kept her waiting for a quarter of an hour before receiving her. When he appeared, his dumpy body, shifty eyes, and slovenliness made her dislike him instantly. Father Fortin listened to her in silence. Trying to be pleasant, Flora explained her reasons for coming to Auxerre. Her Workers' Union project meant the alliance of the entire working class, first in France, then in Europe, and finally all over the world, for the purpose of forging a truly Christian society, infused with brotherly love. He listened with an incredulity that turned gradually into suspicion and finally horror when Flora said that once the Workers' Union was established, the delegates would go to the authorities — including King Louis Philippe himself — to present their demands for social reform, beginning with absolute equal rights for men and women.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa, Natasha Wimmer. Copyright © 2003 Mario Vargas Llosa. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Product details
- Publisher : Picador; First Edition (September 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312424035
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312424039
- Item Weight : 14.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.04 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #524,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,061 in Deals in Books
- #26,840 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #30,547 in American Literature (Books)
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About the author
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, nacido en Arequipa, Perú, en 1936, académico de la lengua, crítico literario, periodista, político y escritor, comenzó su carrera literaria y periodística con tan solo dieciséis años de edad. Sus primeras novelas cosecharon un gran éxito en la década de los sesenta, época en la que aprovechando su prestigio, marchó a Europa y Estados Unidos para fijar su residencia durante varios años. Sus obras son una verdadera exhibición de virtuosismo literario y su prosa integra abundantes elementos experimentales, tales como la mezcla de diálogo y descripción y la combinación de acciones y tiempos diversos. Ganador de múltiples galardones, en su haber cuenta con los premios Planeta, Cervantes, Príncipe de Asturias y el Premio Nobel de Literatura 2010.
La Editorial Alvi Books le dedicó, como tributo y reconocimiento, este espacio en Amazon en 2013.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he lived in Paris. His first story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. Vargas Llosa’s reputation grew with the publication in 1963 of The Time of the Hero, a controversial novel about the politics of his country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the restoration of democratic rule.
A man of politics as well as literature, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International from 1977 to 1979, and headed the government commission to investigate the massacre of eight journalists in the Peruvian Andes in 1983.
Vargas Llosa has produced critical studies of García Márquez, Flaubert, Sartre, and Camus, and has written extensively on the roots of contemporary fiction. For his own work, he has received virtually every important international literary award. Vargas Llosa’s works include The Green House (1968) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), about which Suzanne Jill Levine for The New York Times Book Review said: “With an ambition worthy of such masters of the 19th-century novel as Balzac, Dickens and Galdós, but with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James . . . Mario Vargas Llosa has [created] one of the largest narrative efforts in contemporary Latin American letters.” In 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to broad critical acclaim. In 1984, FSG published the bestselling The War of the End of the World, winner of the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta was published in 1986. The Perpetual Orgy, Vargas Llosa’s study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, appeared in the winter of 1986, and a mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, the year after. The Storyteller, a novel, was published to great acclaim in 1989. In 1990, FSG published In Praise of the Stepmother, also a bestseller. Of that novel, Dan Cryer wrote: “Mario Vargas Llosa is a writer of promethean authority, making outstanding fiction in whatever direction he turns” (Newsday).
In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society. In 1996, Death in the Andes, Vargas Llosa’s next novel, was published to wide acclaim. Making Waves, a collection of his literary and political essays, was published in 1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, a novel, was published in 1998; The Feast of the Goat, which sold more than 400,000 copies in Spanish-language, was published in English in 2001; The Language of Passion, his most recent collection of nonfiction essays on politics and culture, was published by FSG in June 2003. The Way to Paradise, a novel, was published in November 2003; The Bad Girl, a novel, was published in the U.S. by FSG in October, 2007. His most recent novel, El Sueño del Celta, will be published in 2011 or 2012. Two works of nonfiction are planned for the near future as well.
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Whether biographical accuracy is respected or not, it is truly irrelevant. This is a novel, and it is free to ponder on more important things than that.
This is the story of human beings, almost a century apart, facing their own forms of finding paradise, perhaps the kind of paradise that Arthur Rimbaud called "Christmas on earth," if not bliss, a certain peace that can only come after giving yourself over to the vision where desire may reign without stifling moral constrains or the vision of a society where its moral principle is justice. Flora and Paul, in their own circumstances, are devoted to seeing the glory of their visions which they long for, and suffer from, all their lives.
For Flora it's the restless fight for having women finally considered peers to men. Her body agonizing exhausted with the little progress that her words can manage even among leaders of Utopian groups.
For Gauguin it is painting nothing less than epiphany after epiphany, following a God who created and blesses the most essential ways of life. For him, this is what he travels to the Pacific Islands for. He's a Christian longing to be a "savage" -this is longing that has become his form of agony.
It is interesting that both bodies suffer greatly from what their souls pursue. Also, one can conclude that, if these two ever met they would likely be at odds with each other, fail to see anything but an enemy before them.
These are not people to be liked or cherished necessarily, specially Gauguin, yet they are to be understood for the genuine tenor of their passions, loved enough to have them teach you their own truths.
Vargas Llosa, like Coetzee or Kundera, continues to deepen his craft and chance his reputation to pushing the boundaries of contemporary fiction, so willing these days to hail formulas. This alone, is remarkable.
Please, read this novel and be enriched by Flora Tristan, by Paul Gauguin, and even more profoundly, by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Was she crazy, a subversive, an anarchist, a revolutionary? Why would anyone give a part of their salary to be a member of a union? Was she after fame of some sort? No, she wasn’t seeking fame; she was after effectiveness. What she did, she did for others. She dies young, aged 41.
Almost fifty years later, in 1891, Florita’s grandson Paul Tristan, aged 43, is in the French colonial island of Tahiti to imitate the life of Paul Gauguin – he wants to be an artist and to paint his masterpiece. He has abandonned his wife and five children, leaving them in France, to follow his dreams, his freedom, his way to paradise. Paul takes a Tahitian wife, young Teha’amana, a new name, Koke, and a new life as a bohemian artist. What he did, he did for himself.
Both Florita and Paul have ambitions and passions – obsessions – living unconventional lives to pursue them. They watch their societies change around them – Florita sees social reforms, and Paul sees the European inhabitation of Tahiti. They both want to make a difference in the world – Florita wants to change the world with words, and Paul wants to change the world with art.
Written in the third and second person, it is annoying. For example, ‘When, huddled in her bed at the inn in Avallon, she realized that her eyes were damp … How ashamed you must have felt … A sad state of affairs made her departure easier: the chronic feebleness and constant illnesses of her oldest son, Alexandre, who would die in 1830 a the age of eight.’ It is written in the present, and in the past, and in the future, in a jumble of tenses in one paragraph.
This study of passion, influences, drive, ambition, dealing with success and failure, dealing with illnesses and challenges, and being different in a conservative environment – and the things that happen on the way to paradise (their idea of paradise) – fell slightly short of impactful. Nor did it tie together Florita’s and Paul’s lives effectively. It fell short of having the impact to extend this from a very good story to a great one.
I love the themes, the intent, and the concept of this novel. Therefore, I intend to read more novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Discreet Hero (2015) will be next.
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Great book to read and enjoy for a long time to come.