The Bad Girl: A Novel | Mario Vargas Llosa | "You're my praying mantis... The female insect...

The Bad Girl: A Novel | Mario Vargas Llosa | Great Book !

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The Bad Girl: A Novel

	The Bad Girl: A Novel Mario Vargas Llosa Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"You're my praying mantis... The female insect devours the male while he's making love to her. He dies happy, apparently."

(4.5 stars) In 1950, when Ricardo Somocurcio first meets Lily, a "Chilean" exotic in Lima, Peru, he is fifteen, sure of only one thing--that she is the most bewitching creature he has ever known. His young infatuation eventually develops into a lifelong obsession, and his story of how Lily dominates all aspects of his romantic life for more than forty years shows both the mysterious power of unconditional love and the peril of misplaced devotion. Lily is a will-o'-the-wisp, appearing and vanishing, changing names, following the lure of power to revolutionary Cuba, the lure of wealth to Paris, and eventually the lure of both power and wealth to Japan, where her lover is a high ranking yakuza sadist. Somehow, however, she always makes her way back to Ricardo, whom she professes not to love, despite, or perhaps because of, his unquestioned acceptance of her humiliations of him.

From Lima to Paris, London, and Madrid, the story of the "bad girl" and the "good boy" unfolds, exploring all aspects of love and betrayal within the changing settings and political climates of the various countries in which the two have commitments. Whether it be revolutionary Cuba, to which Lily goes as Comrade Arlette; the Tupac Amaru guerilla movement in Peru, where some of Ricardo's friends battle the government; the French revolutionary movement which brought about the downfall of Charles DeGaulle; or the various United Nations conferences in the 1970s and 1980s, which Ricardo attends as a UNESCO translator, love, politics, and violence exist side by side.

Though author Mario Vargas Llosa bases the plot of his book on novels by Flaubert (Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education), he makes Lily an individual--a femme fatale who forever drops in and then out of Ricardo's life--and any parallels with the Flaubert novels remain in the background. Lily, or whatever name she uses when she bursts in on his life, is a product of her times, a woman whose sexual freedom allows her to pursue whatever pleases her, whether that means having an affair with a Cuban leader or engaging in kinky sex with a Japanese gangster. She has no qualms about using Ricardo to solve problems when she is desperate--and then moving on, disappearing unexpectedly and leaving him bereft--as usual. (His constant acceptance of her behavior may make him a problematic protagonist for some readers.)

Vargas Llosa, whose fascination with politics permeates many of his novels, broadens the perspective of this novel beyond that of a love story by tying many of the characters' experiences to revolutionary politics, paying particular attention to Peruvian strongmen from 1960 to 1990. Drawing loose parallels between the bad girl, who represents Ricardo's constantly dashed (and always revitalized) hopes, and political candidates who promise the world and fail to deliver, he sets scenes and brings his characters to life in intense, vibrant prose. Though Vargas Llosa focuses on two people, the bad girl and the good boy, he creates a world around them that is so fully realized that their lives take on symbolic significance: the praying mantis has many parallels in life, love, and politics. Mary Whipple

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Great Book !

Mario Vargas Llosa is my favorite writer of all time, I love him in a way that some friends say I'm obsess with him just because I have all his books and follow his step as a writer, politician and more recent his work in theater. I read The Bad Girl first in Spanish (Travesura de la Nina Mala) and later in English (I prefer the original Spanish version of course). The Bad Girl is a book to love; MVL never looses that magic that grabs the deepest sense of the readers. I won't tell the story because it's written in the introduction, but I will tell that The Bad Girl is simply brilliant, readers will fall for the characters and their situations, sometime you may want to kill them but never stop to love them. One more time my favorite writer didn't let me down and Travesura de la Nina Male full fill all his fans expectations. Love you Mario

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Great read

This is a very different book from Llosa. It is a terrific read and very welcome addition to your library.

Not the 20th Century Madame Bovary

Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel The Bad Girl is unlike the typical Llosa. The structure is linear and he avoids the interplay with time and space that he normally brings into the novel and that is his hallmark. Perhaps because it is meant as a kind of 20th century Madame Bovary, a novel that Llosa admires much and has written a whole book on (The Perpetual Orgy.)

Llosa's The Bad Girl, unlike Flaubert's immortal creation, is unlikely to be counted as among the most significant of own novels- part of the reason is that despite its occasional flashes of brilliance and a most dramatic and contemporary theme, the novelist expects too much from the reader to believe in the many coincidences in the story, and there are just too many pages of dark prose.

I read it over a weekend and it was only my fawning admiration and confidence in Llosa's previous works that kept me going (this is the 18th book by Llosa that I read, not counting 2 incomplete ones.) The prose is good in the beginning of the novel and towards the end, and while it is rather dreary in the big middle chunk, he manages to keep the determined reader engrossed in dramatic- or perhaps over dramatic- sequences leading to its ominous and disturbing end.

Not bad for a weekend read, though.

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The Bad Girl

The first half of this book is a very slow read, pedantic and completely unnecessary. The foundation for the rest of the novel could have been accomplished in four pages. The writing is heavy, not the best translation. When we finally get into the story it is very interesting, with an underlying psychological theme that explains the reasons for the protagonists' actions.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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