To The Last Page

In its passion for love, life and writing, Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel returns, brilliantly, to the inspirations of one if his best novels Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter .  In Travesuras de la Niña Mala , a young idealistic young man leaves Miraflores in Peru with no greater ambition than to spend the rest of his years living in the most beautiful city in the world, Paris. He is content to be nothing more than a humble translator and interpreter as long as it allows him to remain there, but a mysterious beautiful woman from his past turns up unexpectedly, and his life never again knows a moment’s peace. Despite the torments she puts him through over the subsequent decades, he is continually unable to resist her charms. There is little doubt that the desirable but uncontrollable niña mala  is nothing more than Ricardo’s muse, the irresistible impulse to interact with life and write about it - each of her appearances coinciding with a new decade and new stage in the openi...

Burston’s preoccupation in his novels with glamour, camp and gender-bending all find their natural home in his latest novel, an entertaining romp through the New Romantic movement of the 1980s, with some mild satire – or perhaps it’s a fond appreciation for – the post-celebrity platform of modern reality TV shows and tabloid headlines. The story charts the progress of ‘A Boy And His Diva’, a fictional composite of The Human League, Culture Club, Soft Cell and numerous other sexually ambiguous acts from the heyday of the early 1980s. Put together by a young gay man, Tony with a rebellious young friend he once met as a punk teenager, Katrina, the duo ride the crest of the New Romantic wave, competing in the charts with the likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, while bitching in the press with Boy George and Pete Burns, only to share in their inevitable descent of the glamorous lifestyle of drugs and “artistic differences”. Many years later Tony’s manager tries to revive his career by ...