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   Book Info

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El paraýso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise)  
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
ISBN: 9587040465
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review

Book Description
A century passed between the birth of Flora Tristán and the death of her grandson, the great painter Paul Gauguin. They never met, but both dreamed, each in their own way, with a better world. With this novel we get to know these two great personalities that had similar characteristics: an impressive stubbornness and a bulletproof determination and motivation. Description in Spanish: La historia de Flora Tristán y la de su nieto, el gran pintor Paul Gauguin. Entre el nacimiento de la abuela y la muerte de su nieto ha pasado exactamente un siglo, el XIX. No llegaron a conocerse; Paul nació cuatro años después de la muerte de Flora, pero ambos soñaron, cada uno a su manera, con un mundo mejor. Flora buscó y luchó por una sociedad más justa. Paul, que no era tan altruista, buscó una perfección de tipo artístico, una sociedad en la que la belleza no fuera sólo patrimonio del arte y de los artistas, que fuera una realidad a la que todos tuvieran acceso. La abuela y el nieto tenían unas características similares: una terquedad impresionante y una voluntad a prueba de balas. Por eso eran personajes extraordinarios.




El para￯﾿ᄑso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

¿Dónde se encuentra el Paraíso? ¿En la construcción de una sociedad igualitaria o en la vuelta al mundo primitivo? Dos vidas: la de Flora Tristán, que pone todos sus esfuerzos en la lucha por los derechos de la mujer y de los obreros, y la de Paul Gauguin, el hombre que descubre su pasión por la pintura y abandona su existencia burguesa para viajar a Tahití en busca de un mundo no contaminado por las convenciones. Dos concepciones del sexo: la de Flora, que sólo ve en él un instrumento de dominio masculino, y la de Gauguin, que lo considera una fuerza vital imprescindible puesta al servicio de su creatividad. ¿Qué tienen en común esas dos vidas desligadas y opuestas, aparte del vínculo familiar por ser Flora la abuela materna de Gauguin? Esto es lo que Vargas Llosa pone de relieve en esta novela: el mundo de utopías que fue el siglo XIX. Un nexo de unión entre dos personajes que optan por dos modelos vitales opuestos que desvelan un deseo común: el de alcanzar un Paraíso donde sea posible la felicidad para los seres humanos.

In 1844, Flora Tristán embarked on a tour of France to campaign for workers' and women's rights. In 1891, her grandson Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti, determined to escape civilization and paint primitive masterpieces. Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this deft, utterly absorbing novel.

Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return, she makes her name as a popular writer and a champion of the downtrodden, setting herself the arduous task of touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union. Paul, struggling painter and stubborn visionary, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.

FROM THE CRITICS

Criticas - Mateo Samper, Bogota, Colombia Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

In this latest saga, acclaimed Peruvian author Vargas Llosa revisits Flora Tristan, a leading 18th-century French activist considered one of the forerunners of feminism, and Paul Gauguin, the French artist known mostly for his paintings of Tahitian women and landscapes. With no apparent connection between the two characters other than Tristan being Gauguin's grandmother (although they never met), the book recounts their stories separately. Vargas Llosa focuses on an important epoch in each character's life: Flora's last eight months as she promotes her book about workers' rights and her avant-garde socialist and feminist ideas, and Gauguin's life from the moment he abandons his bourgeois homeland for Tahiti in search of the purity and innocence he believed was missing in Europe's languid art. Yet, through flashbacks and glimpses of memory, the author manages to paint a vivid portrait of each character's entire life. Subtly evoked everywhere in the novel is the protagonists' common and tireless search for an alternative world where human happiness is possible-a "paradise" that may be found here on earth or elsewhere. Although at times he succeeds in connecting these seemingly separate lives, Vargas Llosa fails to achieve the narrative unity so particular to previous novels like La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, Suma de Letras, 2001) and Conversacion en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, Suma de Letras, 2001), in which plot and characters link perfectly. At times, the book reads as two separate novelized biographies. Still, it carries the imprint of the author's careful composition and ability with prose, as well as his dazzling means of undressing his characters andexposing their most intimate feelings without deviating from the main plot. Recommended for public and academic libraries, and bookstores.

     



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