Description
Presents the story of a love affair between a Peruvian translator and an adventurous and independent woman, "the bad girl," as it unfolds over the course of forty years, from Lima to London, Paris, Tokyo, and Madrid.
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Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as the teenage "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, saying she's from Chile and vanishing the instant her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her again in Paris, where she is the enchanting "Comrade Arlette," an activist en route to Cuba and a remote lover who denies knowing anything about the Lily of their youth. As the years pass, whatever guise the bad girl assumes - whether that of Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or of Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however she abuses him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.The protean Lily, inspired liar and irresistible muse - will Ricardo ever learn who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. With this brilliantly poignant and intimate new novel, Vargas Llosa has created both a beguiling romance about the power of obsession and a moving meditation on the vicissitudes of individual lives lived against the ever-changing backdrop of history.
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