Travesuras de la Niña Mala - Mario Vargas Llosa

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 opening up of narrator’s life. Even when the author is describing the most passionate of love scenes with the irresistible ‘niña mala’, you suspect that the only banging going on in all those hotel rooms and Parisian garrets is on a typewriter.

It sounds like a clever conceit, but Vargas Llosa makes it all completely real, with his passionate and brilliant writing. Travesuras de la Niña Mala is a dazzling, entertaining and deeply poignant work that, whether you are a writer or not, sums up the need to wholeheartedly embrace life, to make the most of the friendships that come your way, the joys and the heartaches that enrich the experience.