FROM THE PUBLISHER

Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle whose participants may be the fictional creations of Don Rigoberto: Rigoberto himself, by day a gray insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast; his second wife, Lucrecia; and his young son, Alfonso. Husband and wife are estranged because of a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and the boy, a fey, angelic creature who may have seduced her (rather than the other way around). Missing Lucrecia terribly, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies, and unsent letters; meanwhile, the boy visits Lucrecia, determined to regain her favor and win her love. Together, father and son persuade her to enact a series of tableaux vivants based on works by Egon Schiele and other painters. With his usual sly assurance, Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from the Don's imagination.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Since Freud, we've all been aware of the relationship between creativity and procreativity, but few writers have explored the link in such luminous, celebratory detail. Don Rigoberto may or may not be encouraging his estranged wife to engage in lusciously described sex--it could all be inventions in his notebook--and the estrangement may or may not result from a sexual encounter between Dona Lucrecia and her husband's prepubescent son, but it hardly matters. What matters is the extraordinary language and the way Vargas Llosa makes readers rethink love, sex, and imagination. (LJ 4/1/98)

Walter Kenrick - The New York Times Book Review

Vargas Llosa's complex, gorgeous prose...sweeps the reader into a rich confusion of art and fact, fiction and reality.

Kirkus Reviews

Vargas Llosa's most enjoyable novel since his Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982) with which it shares the motif, used elsewhere in his fiction, of a teenager's romantic fixation on his beautiful stepmother. The story is set in Lima, where middle-aged insurance executive Don Rigoberto's happy marriage to his luscious young second wife Lucrecia (amusingly pet-named Lucre) has been temporarily rocked by Lucrecia's indiscretion with her handsome stepson Alfonso (Fonchito), a politely deferential "little pagan god" whose ingenuous questions about male-female interrelationships arouse the distraught Lucrecia beyond boiling point.

Simultaneously, Don Rigoberto fills his "notebooks" with impassioned sexual arcana and fantasizing: arguments with a militant "feminist sec"'; "diatribes" against "Rotarians," who repress sexual energies, and "Sportsmen," who misspend them; and the like. The line between reality and invention is repeatedly blurred, as Vargas Llosa juxtaposes such entries with accounts of Lucrecia's efforts to resist Fonchito and of her previous a submissions to Don Rigoberto's erotic importunings (persuading her, for example, to "enact" the subjects of famous infamous paintings, and—in a dazzling illustration of what a great writer can do with an extended dirty joke—to undertake, then describe a "chaste" vacation enjoyed with a former lover). If the Marquis de Sade had had a sense of humor, he might have anticipated such delights as this novel's urbane fetishism ("A Tiny Foot"), appreciations of love in unexpected places (a "formidable sexual encounter" between mating spiders), and uproarious deadpan dialogue ("I went off last night."/ "'Where to,stepmama ?")... It's all so outrageously entertaining that one must concentrate scrupulously to notice how brilliantly Vargas Llosa uses Don Rigoberto's notebooks to comment on a daunting variety of general cultural as well as sexual topics. An anatomy of Eros unlike any other fiction. Its author may need a cold shower; all the fortunate reader needs is the time and place (preferably bed) to sample its very considerable pleasures.