Las Travesuras de la Niña Mala by Mario Vargas Llosa: A Revolutionary Love Affair between Paris and London

Source: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2024634,00.html

By: Carla Suarez

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

The Author

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s greatest authors, was born in Arequipa, Peru on March 28th 1936, and grew up in neighboring Bolivia, in the city of Cochabamba, located in the warm and sunny lower valleys of the Andes. He spent over ten years in Bolivia before his family returned to Peru and relocated to the capital, Lima, and at the age of nineteen, he married his most influential muse, Julia Urquidi Illanes, a native of Cochabamba and who also happened to be ten years his senior. His controversial union with ‘la tía Julia’ caused some tensions within his family, and once he earned a scholarship to study in Paris in 1956, the couple moved to Europe. 

In Paris, Vargas Llosa worked as a scriptwriter for the French Radio and Television Network alongside his writing career. While in Paris, he published his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1962), followed by La casa verde (1966), and Conversación en La Catedral (1969). Vargas Llosa moved to London in the late 1960’s, teaching at King’s College London as a lecturer of Spanish American Literature, an experience that inspired him to write the novel Las travesuras de la niña mala (2006). 

After spending a couple of years in Swinging London, he returned to Paris, working as a translator at UNESCO alongside fellow Latin Boom author, the Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar. He published one of his most famous novels, La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977), a novel based on his controversial romance with Julia Urquidi. In the late 1980’s, Vargas Llosa, who was an admirer of the Cuban Revolution and Marxism in his youth, entered the political arena in Peru, advocating for liberalism. He ran for president in Peru’s 1990 general election but ultimately lost the presidential race. 

With a longstanding and prosperous career, Vargas Llosa has received numerous distinctions in Hispanic literature, such as the Premio Príncipe de Asturias and the Premio Miguel de Cervantes, as well as international recognitions such as the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Through his work, Vargas Llosa has truly shaped the quintessential ‘realismo mágico’ Latin America is known for, and established himself as one of the greatest writers of the Latin American Boom. 

The Novel

Las travesuras de la niña mala, published in 2006, follows Ricardo, a young man from the upper middle class of Lima, whose lifelong dream has always been to live in Paris, in his pursuit of love across Europe and Latin America.  In his childhood, he meets a girl at a country club named Lily, nicknamed ‘la chilenita’ due to her Chilean accent, for whom he feels a sudden ‘coup de foudre’, and falls deeply in love. 

Years later, in the early 1960s, Ricardo is in his early twenties and studying at La Sorbonne in Paris when he runs into ‘la chilenita’ of his childhood, now a beautiful woman. Lily and Ricardo meet again while attending a clandestine guerrilla meeting in the famous Quartier Latin. Latin American students in Paris at the time were fervent admirers of the Cuban Revolution, and used to gather in Parisian flats decorated with Che Guevara posters to discuss and share ideas on how they could import ‘la Revolución’ to their own countries. Ricardo and his friend Paul were militants of a guerrilla group that had connections in Cuba and sent scholarship recipients to study there. Lily, now known as ‘la Camarada Arlette’ ardently defends the revolutionary ideals Ricardo stands for, making him fall even more deeply in love with her. 

For a fleeting moment, their short-lived romance turns Ricardo’s lifelong dream into reality, but this comes to an end when ‘la camarada Arlette’ is sent off to Cuba, leaving Ricardo on the edge of a nervous breakdown. A jilted Ricardo wanders around Paris, reminiscing the days when he lived with the mysterious woman, as he walks through the streets, parks and restaurants he visited with her. Later on, as the spark of the revolution started to extinguish with the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, Ricardo has distanced himself from his revolutionary ideals and starts working at UNESCO as a translator. As he starts to frequent the diplomatic circles of Paris, he discovers that ‘la camarada Arlette’ is back, under a new identity: Madame Arnoux. They become lovers and they live a passionate affair that ends abruptly when, once again, she leaves him and disappears.

In search of a fresh start, Ricardo moves to London temporarily. He lives the effervescence of ‘Swinging London’ as an outsider to the hedonist hippie movement that was taking over the youth culture, with the rise of rock’n’roll, orchestrated by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and the proliferation of drug consumption. While in London, he runs into his former lover, a socialite who is now known as Mrs. Richardson. Ricardo’s feelings for her keep haunting him and he decides to give her an ultimatum to return to Paris. Mrs. Richardson runs off to the French capital with her ‘niño bueno’. Charmed under her spell, Ricardo is ecstatically in love with her. She finally lets her wall down and reveals her true self to him, only to disappear from his life again. 

This endless tango between the two characters is what makes this novel so fascinating and exciting to read. The runaway ‘niña mala’ is the source of Ricardo’s most passionate love, as well as the cause of his painful agony. Vargas Llosa brilliantly narrates the story from Ricardo’s point of view, making the reader sympathetic to his heartbreak. Furthermore, Vargas Llosa accomplishes a vivid portrait of Paris, London, Tokyo and Madrid across time based on his own personal experience. He vividly portrays the changing places and societies witnessed by a young South American man living his very own personal revolution away from his homeland. Las travesuras de la niña mala is an exquisite and captivating read of Latin American literature.

Carla is a Final-Year Student at King’s College London with a great interest in political economy, international relations and philosophy. Having spent most of her life moving between her homeland Bolivia, and her second homes, Chile, Colombia, Belgium and the United Kingdom, she developed a strong interest in Latin American cultural identity, political affairs and environmental issues and the portrayal of these topics in film and global media.