Aunt Julia & The Scriptwriter

After Mario Vargas Llosa won his Nobel for literature this year, I thought it was time to bring down this book from my shelf and read it. I have had the book for almost two years, but somehow never came down to it, and here I am, 250 pages into the book and thoroughly enjoying it.

Rise quoted Aira in the last post - 'The longer the book is, the less it is literature'. One controversial statement which can negate many a works written by Aira's colleagues of Latin American writers. For, it seems to me, verbosity and several pages are the typical characteristic of Latin American writing. In fact, at close to 400 pages, Aunt Julia... lies on the thinner side of this portfolio. But still it has pages and pages dedicated to an adulterous love-affair between an 18-year old aspirant writer and his 32-year old aunt Julia, and to the eccentricity of a scriptwriter for radio dramas. This original thread, in my opinion, seems to be the least interesting part of the book. The love-story is yawn-boring, and you can only so much enjoy the eccentricity of a Bolovian script-writer who does not talk to anyone.

So what is so interesting in this? To me, frankly, it has been the slightly sensational, irrational and over the top stories that the scriptwriter is writing, which appear as alternate chapters of the book. These are stories where the protagonist is usually a 50 year old male, is detached from the world around him, and great at his work. (In other words, a man crafted after Pedro Camacho - the scriptwriter). These stories are written for effect, no doubt, and highlight many sensational sins of modern lives - incest, parricide, lunacy, self-castration, various forms of cold and hot murders, etc. Despite their sleaziness, (or perhaps because of it) there is something engaging about these stories. They always end in a 'What will happen next...', and though they don't generate the kind of curiosity where you sit for pages wondering what happened to the last story, you are a bit unhappy when the story ends.

In the original thread, the comparison between the writing of protagonist and the script-writer appear several times. While the scriptwriter can churn out endless stories for his serials in one sitting, never looking back on them; the aspirant writer hangs on to some small idea (borrowed), and writes a dramatic story around it, which he puts through various iterations, until it becomes so synthetic that he comes to hate it himself and throws it away. Which one makes better literature? I don't know, for we never get to see the protagonist's stories. But throughout the book, the script-writer seems to hold the bastion, indicated in the reverence with which everyone treats him. It seems that Llosa respects the ability to tell stories. So do I.