Of all the writers of the Latin American Boom, Vargas Llosa is my favorite. I recognize that García Marquez, Fuentes and Cortazar are great writers but I don’t connect with their writing on an emotional level. Vargas Llosa is the only one of the bunch I appreciate not only as a professional but also as a human being.
The time when Vargas Llosa was creating great literature is long gone. He is getting on in years, and now writes very run-of-the-mill, linear narrative, omniscient narrator, “he asked – she answered” kind of novels. Cinco esquinas, his most recent novel, can be summarized as “boring, trivial rich people have boring sex page after boring page.” The Fujimori regime appears somewhere in the background to spice things up but in a half-hearted, unconvincing way.
There are two or three interesting characters that would have merited further development but the writer kept abandoning them in favor of more boring sex among the boring, trivial rich people.
As much as I love this writer, this is not a novel I can recommend, unfortunately.
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