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The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, by Mario Vargas Llosa
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A companion to the scandalous bestseller In Praise of the Stepmother, Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel is "an amazingly seductive work" (San Francisco Chronicle).
The boundary between physical reality and the imagination has been at the heart of literature in Spanish ever since Don Quixote. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, his most generous and ambitious novel in years, Mario Vargas Llosa draws on that tradition to explore the possibilities of imagination in our own time.
Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle: Don Rigoberto himself, by day a gray insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast; his second wife, Lucrecia; and his young son, Alfonso. Husband and wife are estranged because of a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and the boy, a fey, angelic creature who may have seduced her (rather than the other way around). Missing Lucrecia terribly, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies, and unsent letters; meanwhile the boy visits Lucrecia, determined to regain her favor and win her love. The resulting novel, an intoxicating mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.
"Exuberant . . . a roguish and sophisticated sex comedy." --Time
- Sales Rank: #1766774 in Books
- Published on: 1999-07-01
- Released on: 1999-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.36" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
"It is not the world of cunning cattle that you and I are part of which interests me and brings me joy or suffering, but the myriad of beings animated by imagination, desire and artistic skill, the beings present in the paintings, books, and prints that I have collected with the patience and love of many years."
Near the beginning of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, the title character writes these words to the architect designing his new home, thus setting the theme for this slightly fantastical, wholly erotic novel that celebrates the ascendancy of imagination over real life. Readers familiar with Vargas Llosa's work will recognize Don Rigoberto from the earlier In Praise of the Stepmother, in which the author first introduced the middle-aged insurance executive, his beautiful second wife, Lucrecia, and his preternaturally sensual son, Alfonsito. In that book, the pubescent "Fonsito" manages to seduce his stepmother and then writes an essay about the experience that he lets his father read. The novel ends with Lucrecia's expulsion from the household and the revelation that Fonsito had orchestrated the whole thing from the beginning for reasons of his own. Now, in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Vargas Llosa picks up where he left off, with Alfonsito's reappearance on the doorstep of Lucrecia's new home. Once again, this "Beelzebub, a viper with the face of an angel" has a hidden agenda--this time, apparently, to reunite his father and stepmother.
As in its predecessor, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto filters erotic passions and desires through art and artifice; Alfonsito uses the life and work of painter Egon Schiele to seduce his stepmother's imagination if not her body; Don Rigoberto and Lucrecia fan the flames of sexual passion through elaborate fantasies that they present as reality. It is almost as if no act, thought, or feeling can be real unless it has first existed in the imagination; even as Rigoberto and Lucrecia make love on their first night back together he informs her that, in his notebooks, she "'has gone to bed with many people all year.' 'I want details,' Dona Lucrecia gasp[s], speaking with difficulty. 'All of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me.'"
The novel is the literary equivalent of matryoshki, those nests of dolls within dolls that Russian toymakers made to enthrall young children. Egon Schiele's life story, Lucrecia's erotic encounters, Rigoberto's notebooks, the 20 anonymous letters that reunite Rigoberto and his wife--all unfold, stories within stories and fantasies within fiction, until Vargas Llosa arrives, at last, at his happy ending, with a twist. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is erotic without being graphic, so fantastical that even the seduction of a 40-year-old matron by a pubescent boy reads more like myth (think Cupid and Psyche) than today's headlines. Vargas Llosa's cool, wry prose helps to elevate the hijinks above the merely prurient, making this fable of love, art, and manipulation a pleasure without guilt. --Alix Wilber
From Library Journal
Since Freud, we've all been aware of the relationship between creativity and procreativity, but few writers have explored the link in such luminous, celebratory detail. Don Rigoberto may or may not be encouraging his estranged wife to engage in lusciously described sex?it could all be inventions in his notebook?and the estrangement may or may not result from a sexual encounter between Do?a Lucrecia and her husband's prepubescent son, but it hardly matters. What matters is the extraordinary language and the way Vargas Llosa makes readers rethink love, sex, and imagination.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Deliciously challenging, delightfully lurid, the latest novel by the famous Peruvian writer tempts the reader into the world of a married couple from Lima, the successful Don Rigoberto and his second wife, Lucrecia. Husband and wife, as the story opens, are separated; a sexual interlude took place between Don Rigoberto's young son and Lucrecia, and for allowing it to happen, Lucrecia had to move out of the house to live on her own, by her husband's demand. Rigoberto has a vivid imagination, and in his wife's absence--to keep loneliness at bay because of her absence--he inscribes in notebooks, by night, his remembrances and fantasies and wishes vis-a-vis her sexual abilities. His young son, at the same time, visits Lucrecia regularly to attempt a reconciliation between father and stepmother. What is real about this couple's lives and what is simply embroidery by Don Rigoberto in his notebooks? Vargas Llosa makes certain the reader is not always certain. This is not a novel of great narrative drive; its strengths are its lush language and suitably languid tone in depicting the satisfaction of sexual congress. Brad Hooper
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
By Damian Kelleher
Don Rigoberto and Dona Lucrecia have recently separated. Dona Lucrecia, in a moment of weakness, extended their game of nightly fantasy and exploration into reality, allowing herself to be seduced by Fonchito, Don Rigoberto's young son from a previous marriage. Now, both Don Rigoberto and Dona Lucrecia are miserable, living apart when all they want to do is be together.
The novel is constructed with several timelines, only one of which is easily identifiable. The main thread of the narrative explores Dona Lucrecia's guilt, but also her growing awareness that Fonchito is the seducer par excellence. He uses his young, lithe body as a constant tool for seduction, and as he learns what makes his stepmother blush and what makes her cringe, he develops his language such that Dona Lucrecia is constantly confused as to just what it is this young man wants from her.
Fonchito's obsession with Egon Schiele, an Austrian figurative painter from the early twentieth century, forms another layer of the novel. He is incredibly knowledgeable about this tortured figure, quoting him incessantly and showing his stepmother Schiele's paintings, a large number of which are erotic or nudes. Fonchito believes that his own life will mimic that of Schiele's, which is to say that he will die of Spanish Flu at twenty-eight. It is worth noting that throughout Schiele's short life, his work was considered obscene, due to the explicit nature of his paintings.
The other, most easily definable aspect of the novel is Don Rigoberto himself. Very often, we learn of Don Rigoberto through his erotic, fantasy-filled discussions with his wife. We are given the impression that the bedroom is where Don Rigoberto comes to life, it is where he is truly a man - outside of it, he is described as ugly, as bland, as grey. But through the erotic coupling of man and wife, Don Rigoberto reveals a passion for drama, for fantasy, for impression.
It is unclear whether Don Rigoberto's discussions with his wife are about fantasies they share, of experiences she has had, or whether the entire situation itself is a fantasy. Llosa weaves his tale in such a way that we are left - not confused - but guessing. Do all these extremely varied and erotic encounters really happen to Dona Lucrecia? Why does Don Rigoberto allow them if, by his own admission, they tear his heart and wound his soul? Are the stories just that - devices for mutual titillation?
The passages where Dona Lucrecia describes her adventures to Don Rigoberto are usually extremely erotic, as well as beautifully written. Llosa does not shy away from even the most taboo of taboos, so a brief warning should be made. While the writing is always tasteful, and more often than not ambiguously shrouded with metaphor and simile, there is no denying that topics such as bestiality, incest and so forth might be too much for some readers.
We come to learn of Dona Lucrecia and Don Rigoberto's relationship best through their bedtime conversations. There is the gentle give and take of the married couple, the words left unsaid and the ones that shouldn't have been mentioned. There is an overwhelming sense of comfort and knowledge that is often touching - these scenes are written by a man with a clear eye for the erotic awareness that a couple must surely have after ten years together.
If you were to strip the eroticism out of the novel, there would not be much left - this is a novel on love alone. A passage towards the end, titled 'Letter to the Reader of Playboy, or A Brief Treatise on Aesthetics', is the clearest statement of the entire piece. This is Llosa's impassioned cry for the secretive withdrawal of eroticism, the sacred bond that a couple shares with one another. He decries the commerce of these magazines, recognising that they de-mistify, but also de-eroticise what should be the magic and splendour of sex and love. He says, 'pornography strips eroticism of its artistic content, favors the organic over the spiritual and mental, as if the central protagonists of desire and pleasure were phalluses and vulvas and these organs not mere servants to the phantoms that govern our souls and segregates physical love from the rest of human experience.'. We can but only agree.
Possible the greatest difficulty of the novel is that we don't know what to trust and who to believe. There are early indications that Dona Lucrecia's grand adventures - a week-long trip to New York and Paris among the greatest inventions - are completely fictional, but there are also hints that they might all be true. As the novel progresses, we are exposed to greater, less likely situations, and in these, the language used indicates still further the dreamlike quality of the narrative. But is it a dream? Does it all come down to what is recorded in Don Rigoberto's notebooks? The answer, when it comes, is both surprising and expected. The novel ties itself into a neat bow and really, it couldn't be any other way.
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is a fascinating journey through the sexual lives of a couple that are both sexually and emotionally comfortable with one another. While erotic, it is never vulgar, and deserves a place alongside Marquez' magnificent essay on love, Love in the Time of Cholera, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Roth's The Dying Animal.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Funny and thought-provoking
By A Customer
I really liked this book- Vargas Llosa explores everything from sex (a lot of it) to nationalism to art. Fonchito's character was fascinating and I found myself ready to read a biography of Schiele after I finished.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Boston Phoenix review of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
By A Customer
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman (FSG, 259 pages, $23, 1998). by Nicholas Patterson
"I read, look at my pictures, review and add to my notebooks . . . but, above all, I fantasize. I dream. I construct a better reality . . . Only when I am in that world, in that company, do I exist, for then I am joyful and content," (p. 226) explains the title character of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto near the end of the novel. This explanation helps make sense of a novel where the line between fantasy and reality is often blurred and the former seems more real than the latter. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is divided between the story of a bizarre love triangle (Rigoberto, his estranged wife Lucrecia, and his young son Alfonso), the fantasies and letters Don Rigoberto writes in his notebooks, and to a lesser extent Lucrecia's dreams. The Notebooks takes up where Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother (FSG, 1990) left off: Rigoberto and Lucrecia have separated after Rigoberto discovers that Alfonso (or Fonchito) has seduced his stepmother (though Fonchito's age is never precisely given, he is portrayed as being somewhere between 10 and 13 years old). Having succeeded in his seduction and in publicizing it to his father through an essay in the Stepmother, Fonchito decides to reunite Rigoberto and Lucrecia in the Notebooks. Fonchito re-enters Lucrecia's life and through conversations about the life and work of his idol, the painter Egon Schiele, tries to convince her to get back together with Rigoberto. Fonchito provides a further catalyst for the couple's reunion by writing two series of 10 anonymous letters to Lucrecia and Rigoberto which each mistake as being written by their spouse. Intertwined with the story of Fonchito's machinations are a series of Rigoberto's and Lucrecia's late night meditations, fantasies, and dreams. Rigoberto, a mild mannered insurance executive, escapes his mundane reality through elaborate games and fantasies involving his missing wife. Physically faithful to his wife, Rigoberto imagines her in a series of romantic interludes with among others: "a twin brother of mine whom I invented, a Corsican brother, in an orgy. With a castrated motorcyclist. You were a law professor in Virginia, and you corrupted a saintly jurist. You made love to the wife of the Algerian ambassador in a steambath. Your feet maddened a French fetishist of the eighteenth century. . . we were in a Mexican brothel with a mulatta who pulled off one of my ears in a single bite." (p. 253-4) Llosa weaves these fantasies together with real life events so skillfully that it isn't until near the end of the book that one knows what has happened and what has been imagined. This ambiguity between fact and fiction, which Llosa has employed in previous novels including Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, emphasizes the idea that the life of the mind is as, and often more, important than the life of the body. Through imagination one can rise above everyday life and create a world as one wants it to be. Llosa suggests that love arises from being able to share this world with another. When Rigoberto tells Lucrecia about his fantasies near the end of the book, Lucrecia responds: "I want details . . . all of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me." (P. 253) Though The Notebooks is filled with sensual and sexual fantasies it is not pornographic. Llosa pulls off this difficult feat by relating erotic work without resorting to graphic imagery (Rigoberto writes a scathing "Letter to the Reader of Playboy" which rails against people who limit their sexual imagination by relying on pornography). The novel drags a little near the end as Rigoberto delves perhaps a little to deeply into a foot fetish fantasy. However, in general, the book has a very quick and exciting pace, in part due to Edith Grossman's translation. Llosa's The Notebooks is an elegant exploration of the psychology of love and desire.
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