The Neighbourhood
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Edith Grossman
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Nobel-Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa has been described as “a literary colossus”. He might well be, but certainly not on the merits of The Neighbourhood. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that that this 2016 novel is badly written. But, certainly, I expected better from one of the biggest names in South American fiction.
In essence, The Neighbourhood is a crime thriller set in 1990s Peru, against the backdrop of the Fujimori regime. It is a time of political unrest. Kidnappings and violent terrorist attacks, curfews and blackouts are the order of the day. Despite these “inconveniences”, industrialist Enrique, his bosom friend (and legal advisor) Luciano, and their respective wives Marisa and Chabelo, lead a privileged existence, waited upon by maids and servants, enjoying parties and the occasional trip to Miami. Things go awry when a sleazy journalist Rolando Garro blackmails Enrique with some compromising photographs. This is just the start of Enrique’s troubles. When Garro is found dead, Enrique becomes a suspect in a tangled skein which will have implications up to the highest echelons of Peruvian power, reaching Fujimori himself (and giving Vargas Llosa, Fujimori’s real-life political rival, the opportunity for sweet, literary revenge).
The story is enjoyable enough and Vargas Llosa occasionally spices it up with some stylistic experiments – such as a chapter written in the form of an interview, and another in which, like a frenzied film director, the third person narrator jumps from one scene/character to another in a feverish vortex. But at the end of it all, the novel feels shallow, much like the vacuous, cringe-worthy dialogue between the book’s “star couples”.
And then there’s the sex. Marisa and Chabela, who identify themselves as heterosexual, suddenly discover a physical desire for each other and, later in the novel, a passion for threesomes. OK, I get the point about this aspect of the novel standing for the dishonesty, cheating and secrecy which taint all the characters. However, the voyeuristic sex scenes, radical as they might have been, say, forty years ago, now come across as, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, disturbingly like a prurient male fantasy.
I have
read some great translations by veteran Edith Grossman, and I’m sure she does a
great job here – this is not enough, however, to assuage my sense of
disappointment at this novel.
Published May 3rd 2018 by Faber & Faber
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