Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

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Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a humorous surreal novel by Mario Vargos Llosa, the Peruvian writer who is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The story’s structure is like a Russian nesting doll and its variants. It contains two main plot lines. The first is the realistic anchor of the 18 year old Varguitas (diminutive for Vargos) falling for his 32 year old divorced aunt by marriage, Julia. The story anchor is based on the author’s memory of his youth passionately pursuing his decade older aunt, Julia Urquidi Illanes. The second follows an obsessive Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, hired by the station Varguitas works for, to churn out numerous soap serials daily. In his interview, Vargas Llosa said that although Pedro Camacho is not a real person, he was based on a man Llosa knew who wrote radio serials for Radio Central in Lima. The man would churn out countless scripts with ease, barely taking time to review them. The man was the first professional writer Llosa has known. Llosa was fascinated with the unlimited world the man was able to create. One day, the man’s stories started to overlap, with the plots and characters getting mixed up. This inspired Vargas Llosa’s main theme.

Principal photography began in Wilmington, North Carolina, on August 15, 1989. Hurricane Hugo damaged the film sets, so the production moved to New Orleans. Filming was wrapped by November 2. [1] Llosa, as a young radio newsman in Lima in 1953, worked with a singular Bolivian named Raul Salmon, and he has said that he based his fictional scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, on Salmon. The eighteen-year-old youth gets infatuated with his aunt… He is a main hero and narrator of the story…so the soaps become the blueprints of Camacho's imagination, and what we are given is a privileged view of the arcane and volcanic reaches of a writer's psyche.

Le due parti si fondono agli occhi del lettore restituendo l'immagine di un paese povero e pieno di problemi, ma che brilla di una luce intensissima di vita e di sentimento.I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself writing that I was writing and that I was writing that I was writing that I was writing. I can also imagine myself writing that I had already written that I would imagine myself writing that I had written that I was imagining myself writing that I see myself writing that I am writing.

As I read I was perplexed by the two-dimensional clichés perfectly embodied in their exaggerated and flawless character traits. It was as though Jeffrey Archer's ghost had got into Llosa’s bloodstream. Is that the best you could do, Mr. Llosa? Come on!. My hunch that I were missing something turned out to be right. It was in the middle of the third story I realised what was happening: Pedro Camacho hadn’t made appearance by that time, but his electrifying radio serials were reproduced verbatim with all their pulpy gloss, alternated by the second narrative stream that concerns the narrator Marito’s account of his love affair with Aunt Julia. The novel came truly to life in the second half when Camacho’s stories took on the comical effect. The story is set in the Lima of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. He writes 10 half-hour installments a day for his serials, one an hour, then works seven more hours rehearsing and recording them. ''The scripts,'' Mario recalls, ''came pouring out ... each of them exactly the right length, Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived 'only' to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate? When I thought about such things, I felt sad and upset. The hero(the protagonist) of Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter is a young aspiring writer. As the title indicates, there is a certain aunt Julia. Our eighteen year old protagonist falls in love with his aunt Julia. They are not really related, but there is an age difference to consider. At the same time, the novel follows the fate of a famous radio soap opera writer. The book is divided into chapters devoted to episodes of popular soap operas that are then followed by chapters describing the life of our protagonist. The two merge together perfectly. I quite enjoyed the bit of intertexuality that is present in this novel.

Camacho lives monastically, loathes money, snubs the fame his serials give him. When he writes, he assumes roles physically, wearing false mustaches, a fireman's hat, the mask of a fat woman. Mario finds him at his enormous typewriter, writing about Sebbene non si incontrino quasi mai nel corso del romanzo, la zia Julia e Pedro Camacho, lo scribacchino, ne condividono il titolo a buon diritto: rappresentano i due poli della vita del giovane protagonista narrante, rampollo di buona famiglia della capitale Lima, nei cui panni non è difficile individuare molti tratti biografici dell’autore. At the same time a very promising scriptwriter, employed by the radio station to write soap opera serials, enters the stage… Aunt Julia, fourteen years older than Mario, a divorced Bolivian who cannot bear children. Physically attractive, she dazzles the young Mario with what he perceives to be healthy cunning and spontaneity. Close family ties prevent their ever getting together, but Julia is decisive and ultimately responsible for their union. She is warm and brave, and she has a wonderful sense of humor, which is what really allows her to continue, despite her awareness that their relationship will not last. The story of her divorce, ending a marriage that lasted three more years than she expected, is told strictly from Mario’s point of view.