In this gossipy, easy to read novel, the Peruvian writer Jaime Bayly talks about the messy private lives of the Hispanic writers of the 1970s when literature in Spanish was at its peak. At the center of Geniuses are Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez but plenty other authors and cultural figures make an appearance.
The novel belongs to the entertainment genre and doesn’t aspire to much else but there are two takeaways I have from it.
One is that it will never cease being amazing that a source of incredible artistic beauty appears inside of very ugly people. These writers are ugly in their politics, lifestyles, friendships, daily habits, and personal lives. And at the same time, they are geniuses who create incomparable, astonishing beauty.
The second takeaway is that the wives of these famous writers are more like house pets than actual people. They allow themselves to be mistreated and humiliated in the most bizarre ways but you kind of don’t even feel bad for them like you don’t feel bad for a herd of cattle in a field or a potted geranium. It’s even hard to blame the writers for mistreating them because these women don’t have a problem with abjection as long as they get fed and housed in return.
The writer wives make a great contrast with Carmen Balcells, a genius businesswoman who was the literary agent of pretty much every important Spanish-languge writer in the second half of the twentieth century. I wish somebody wrote a novel about Balcells and her extraordinary discipline and business sense. In Geniuses she appears far less often than the many writers’ wives and mistresses who have the intellectual and emotional complexity of an amoeba.
I read the book because October is a difficult month for a public education bureaucrat, and I can’t process anything very demanding. But this is a highly enjoyable novel, and it’s the only one by Bayly that I ever managed to read. He tends to be very immersed in his boring neuroses but here he finally moved away from that and ended up writing a very nice book.
I recently wrote about Vargas Llosa and his wife in old age, but it was just as bad when they were young. But again, you want to feel sorry for Patricia when Vargas Llosa dumps her with three little kids, one of them a newborn, for some random model. But then Patricia immediately off-loads the kids on relatives because she only needs them to keep her rich and famous husband around. Once he’s gone, she discards the kids like used toilet paper.
As I said, these are all very primitive human beings. But it’s fun to read about them.
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