Latins and Literary Lovers

By R.Z. Sheppard

AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER by Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Helen R. Lane; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 374 pages; $16.50

Latin American fiction periodically ar rives like an out-of-touch cousin on a vacation trip. In the voice of translation, it speaks of strong family resemblances: realism, surrealism, stream of conscious ness, political protest and satire. The visitor is wined, dined, praised for its variety and daring. Then, with a hearty abrazo, Latin American fiction departs and North Americans go back to what they like to read best: costumed romance and novelized journalism.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by contrast, works both sides of the equator.

The novel is a bedazzlement of popular entertainment and what, after more than 50 resistant years, is still called experimental writing. Its author, Mario Vargas Llosa, 45, is a versatile Peruvian with a growing international reputation. His previous novels include The Time of the Hero, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral. The War of the End of the World, an untranslated novel of a 19th century peasant uprising in Brazil, is currently a bestseller in Spain and South America. His plays, criticism and topical articles appear regularly, and he recently wrote about the World Cup soccer matches for Barcelona's La Vanguardia. Once a supporter of Castro's Cuba, Vargas Llosa now campaigns against totalitarian regimes of the left and the right. He is a backer of Poland's Solidarity movement and a former president of the P.E.N. club, the international writers' organization that monitors the restriction of free expression. This is the stuff that puts writers on the Nobel Prize track.

In Lima, where Vargas Llosa lives with his wife and three children, he is not only a cultural celebrity but a man who is expected to have the answers to public questions. This is both the blessing and the burden of many writers in Latin America and Europe, where literature and politics retain close ties. For an author in a poor An dean country with a large uneducated Indian population, the is sues and responsibilities are sharpened. "If you are a writer," says Vargas Llosa, "you are a privileged man in this kind of society." Many of his conservative countrymen have felt that he has abused the privilege. Those ear lier Vargas Llosa novels, some written while he lived in Europe, were glaring reflections of Peruvian oppression and corruption and the Latin cult of virility. The most stylish was Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), in which the country was symbolically depicted as a brothel during the administration of President Manuel Odria.

Aunt Julia is set in that same period of the 1950s, though Odria and his political procurers are not in sight. Instead, Vargas Llosa's Lima is a bright tangle of characters: Indians from the mountains and the edge of the Amazon busy filling up new slums; a middle class trying to keep its balance in an unstable economy; and the rich preserving the good life and marrying off their daughters in style. There are shocks and bizarre surprises, but the prevailing atmosphere of the novel is a melancholy gaiety.

This is the city of the author's youth and early manhood, a fact conspicuously observed by a charming narrator named Mario. Vargas Llosa is an artful dissembler. He appears to have taken the defensible position that since most autobiographies are figments of self-serving imaginations, one might as well accept memory as a fiction machine and get on with it. Mercifully he lightens this intellectual load by turning his life into a soap opera and putting its popular conventions to higher literary uses. Banalities become oddly resonant and trivialities bristle with jeopardy. Episodes of scandal, lunacy and mayhem are drawn together by the two main story lines. A romance between Mario, 18, and Julia, 32, is a mock cliffhanger; the rise and fall of Pedro Camacho, a compulsive writer of soap-opera scripts, is a comic tale with tragic relief.

Both Julia and the scriptwriter are from Bolivia, an instant Peruvian joke. Like Charley's Aunt ("I'm from Brazil, where the nuts come from"), rambunctious Julia is not as advertised. She is the former sister-in-law of Mario's uncle and so no blood relative. But by constantly referring to her as Aunt Julia, Mario keeps the tingle of a semi-scandalous relationship in his narrative. Paralleling this "real-life" romance are Camacho's soap operas. Dwarfish but with a melodious voice that has listeners imagining a movie idol, Camacho spends all his waking hours writing, directing and acting in his creations. He considers them works of genius, but eventually he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. Real names creep into his serials, and characters from one story appear in the plots of others. This madness of art stands in pathetic contrast to the highly disciplined complexity of the novel. To Mario, who edits news bulletins at the radio station and writes arty stories on the side, Pedro Camacho is a cultural irony: "How could he be, at one and the same time, a parody of the writer and the only person in Peru who, by virtue of the time he devoted to his craft and the works he produced, was worthy of that name? Were all those politicians, attorneys, professors who went by the name of poets, novelists, dramatists really writers, simply because, during parentheses in lives in which four-fifths of their time was spent at activities having nothing to do with literature, they had produced one slim volume of verse or one niggardly collection of stories?"

The resentful tone echoes Vargas Llosa novels in which Peru was often depicted as a parody society. Those books had powerful intentions, but they also had moments that recalled Peter De Vries' line about the writer who puts readers into a diving bell and takes them down three feet. Aunt Julia is an ingenious and delightful turnabout, a glass-bottom social comedy that offers some deep, dark perspectives to those who care to look down. --By R.Z. Sheppard

EXERPT

"As Aunt Julia and I watch in openmouthed amazement, by changing props and costumes Pedro Camacho transformed himself [into] an old lady, a beggar, a bigot, a cardinal... During this series of lightning-quick changes he kept talking, in a fervent tone of voice. 'And why shouldn't I have the right to become one with characters of my own creation, to resemble them? Who is there to stop me from having their noses, their hair, their frock coats as I describe them?' he said, exchanging a biretta for a meerschaum, the meerschaum for a duster, and the duster for a crutch. 'What does it matter to anyone if I lubricate my imagination with a few bits of cloth?'"

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