Set in 1950s Lima, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter follows eighteen-year-old Marito: law student, aspiring writer, radio news hack, and soon-to-be problem for his own extended family.

His life is thrown off course by two arrivals: Julia, a recently divorced Bolivian woman fourteen years his senior, and Pedro Camacho, an obsessive radio serial writer addicted to melodrama.

Vargas Llosa builds the book in alternating currents between characters. Marito’s comic, semi-autobiographical account of desire, work, family scandal and literary ambition, spliced with Camacho’s increasingly deranged soap-opera scripts. It's a romance and a farce, sure, but also a study of fiction-making itself. We see how stories breed, distort, repeat, lose control, and start gnawing through the walls.

Funny, formally playful and much sharper than its premise suggests, this is Vargas Llosa at his most readable. A good one for readers who like their Latin American fiction less mystical-cloud-machine and more “young writer makes terrible decisions while a radio man goes insane.”

1984 Picador paperback edition, translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. Some visible cover and corner wear, including creasing/rubbing to edges and general age-toning, but a solid reading copy with excellent period Picador cover design.