The Bad Girl

by Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated from the original Spanish by Edith Grossman

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as “Lily” in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting “Comrade Arlette,” an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as—whether it’s Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman—and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

The protean Lily, gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse—does Ricardo ever know 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. In MarioVargas Llosa’s beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

(From Publisher).

Mario Vargas Llosa is the author of eight novels, most recently The Way to Paradise (FSG, 2003), and was the recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2002. He lives in London.

The bad girl,, although very bad indeed, is profoundly human, making us wish, as the narrator, that things could be different. It's impossible not to get involved, committed sometimes with the characters' saga. It's a very unusual love story that captivates and bothers us. And the historical background that serves very well to the plot also gives the reader glimpses of fundamental changes in our times. It's a great story with passionate characters.

A story lying between comedy and tragedy. Love is proved with a million faces to its hero. This novel paints a panoramic history of four decades of South American and European life, continually challenges readers expectations and questions the very nature of identity, "goodness" and "badness".

Ricardo's constant love for "the bad girl" who keeps appearing in his life is described against the backdrop of four decades of Peruvian history, in a book inspired by Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"