Review: The Neighborhood

The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Years ago I read what I gather is an obscure Vargas Llosa novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. I loved it; it suggested a way of seeing the political filtered through the lens of the novel, and it left me with deep admiration for the future Nobel laureate.

Strangely, it now seems to me, that’s could be the last Vargas Llosa book I’ve read. As a result, I have little to compare this new one to – a new one that may well be the last he will manage to write.

In general, then, I think this is a disappointing work. I don’t know my contemporary Peruvian history all that well, but this feels in large measure like a wish fulfillment story. It ends with the downfall of Alberto Fujimori, the Peruvian president who defeated Vargas Llosa in national elections and did in fact get sentenced to many years in prison for corruption and state violence. It also allows an old man (Vargas Llosa is 83) to fantasize about Lesbian sex and three-ways.

This starts out better than it ends, with a skillful series of chapters that introduce us to a wealthy engineer/businessman, his wife, her best friend and lover, that woman’s lawyer husband, a journalist who threatens the engineer, that journalist’s chief disciple, and an old man who hates the journalist for a hit-piece that cost him his career.

I’m mocking the strategy a bit, but it is rewarding as it at first unfolds. Vargas Llosa certainly knows how to craft a story, and each character enters without wasted narrative.

Over time, though, the sex begins to feel indulgent and the story contrived. The well-drawn characters of the beginning become increasingly flat. [SPOILER] The engineer, for instance, goes from feeling humiliated by his involvement in a staged orgy to embracing the chance for a threesome. [SPOILER] The journalist/disciple, without much incentive that we’re shown, suddenly risks her life to expose Fujimori’s terror-state architect. And then it’s all a happy ending – that’s literally the title of the last chapter, “Happy Ending?”

I found most of this generally satisfying, although I expected more from a Nobel prize winner. But, strangely, he seems to get tired of his own conceit. Until the 20th chapter, he uses each chapter like a skillful still-life. In that one – which runs more than twice as long as the others – he confusingly blurs several strands of his story. (It’s difficult to read since he gives no warning in the text when he’s switching from scene to scene.) I can see someone defending it as a postmodern move; I found it lazy and ineffective. It felt like someone in a hurry to wrap up a novel he could no longer see as compelling in the way he began it.

[SPOILER] The dubious “happy ending” of the final chapter is somewhat confusing as well. It refers in part to the fall of Fujimori, but it also seems to imply that the sexual threesome may have become a foursome. Or, equally, that it’s been found out in a way that brings it to its end. Either way, it seems unnecessary and, worst of all, uninspired.

I’ll try someday to get to the works that made Vargas Lllosa’s reputation. After this, I’m not in too great a hurry.


View all my reviews