THE BAD GIRL

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

THE BAD GIRL
By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman.
276 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Author photograph by Luis Acosta/Agence France-Presse

Do you recognize the story?

It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him.

Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

The genius of “Madame Bovary,” as Vargas Llosa describes it in “The Perpetual Orgy,” is the “descriptive frenzy … the narrator uses to destroy reality and recreate it as a different reality.” In other words, Flaubert was a master of realism not because he reproduced the world around him, but because he used language to create an alternate existence, a distillate whose emotional gravity transcends that of life itself. Emma, Vargas Llosa reminds us, has survived countless readers. Not merely immortal but undiminished by time, her passions remain as keen as the day her ink was wet.

The full review from the New York Times...........

Wikipedia website