Life, Liberty and Lustiness

By R.Z. Sheppard

Mario Vargas Llosa the politician ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as a fiscal conservative. Happily, Vargas Llosa the winning novelist remains a staunch romantic libertarian. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 260 pages; $23) is, like his delectable Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977; translated into English in 1982), a roguish and sophisticated sex comedy with a few brain teasers tipped in.

At the heart of both books is a deep appreciation of individual liberty, a strong disdain for convention and a young man's infatuation with an interested older woman. Vargas Llosa forged his talent in such rebellious passions. In 1962, Peruvian authorities burned hundreds of copies of his politically explosive first novel, The City and the Dogs. The literary firebrand was also known for his precocious love life.

Now, at 62, the novelist takes full advantage of his professional prerogative: to grant complete freedom to the facts of his life. Don Rigoberto is an exuberant alteration of autobiography in which anything can happen. That includes a teenager's love affair with his stepmother and, perhaps even more socially unacceptable, book burning by a bibliophile. The Don, a Lima insurance executive by day and an aesthete at night, regularly incinerates his unwanted books and pictures to make room for new additions. Why not donate them to libraries and museums? His answer ("I realized it was stupid to inflict on other eyes a work I had come to consider unworthy of mine") suggests both a refreshing approach to criticism and a fine madness.

Unfortunately, the middle-aged connoisseur can't keep other eyes--and hands--off his prized acquisition, second wife Lucrecia. Nor does he necessarily want to, as long as his beautiful and loving mate shares the aphrodisiacal details with him.

But only up to a point. The irresistible Lucrecia is sadly ordered out of the house after a dalliance with her husband's 17-year-old son Alfonso, an art student and devilishly knowing seducer. Not for "Fonchito" such cloddish lines as "come up and see my etchings." Instead, he patiently inflames his reluctant step-mother with his enthusiasm for the tragic life and erotic work of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele.

That steamy story line contrasts with the romantic fantasies and crusty musings of Don Rigoberto, an antisocial anarchist and cultural conservative who sounds like another overheated Austrian, the Belle Epoque critic Karl Kraus. Or perhaps Vargas Llosa's alter-Egon, used to seduce the reader. Rigoberto coos about the fleshy pleasures and fulminates against vulgarity and cant. He dismisses all art described as "brilliant" and rejects all ideologies as "leveling forms of oppression that are generally worse than the despotisms against which they rebelled."

Vargas Llosa's languorous coupling of high culture and high decadence has, like Lima, a faded charm. It is not for hedonists who prefer their stimulation red hot and humorless.

--By R.Z. Sheppard