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Title: The Way to Paradise : A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, Natasha Wimmer ISBN: 0-374-22803-5 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 19 November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A Disappointing Book From a Masterful Author
Comment: Mario Vargas Llosa is one of my favorite writers and I thought THE FEAST OF THE GOAT was masterful, so I was very eager to read THE WAY TO PARADISE, especially since I love the work of Paul Gauguin. I have to say that I'm shocked that there are so few reviews of this book here. Vargas Llosa is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and one of Latin America's most important writers of all time.
Although I would have preferred a book about Gauguin only, THE WAY TO PARADISE is made up of narratives that concern themselves with the life of Gauguin and the life of his grandmother, Flora Tristan, the illegitimate daughter of a Peruvian man and a French woman. Gauguin never knew his grandmother (he was born four years after her death) but the two seemed to have shared several traits in common, something Vargas Llosa highlights.
Gauguin's story takes place during the last twelve years of his life, primarily in Tahiti and the Marquesas, though Vargas Llosa does gives us details of the painter's earlier life in flashbacks. If you don't know much about Gauguin going in, you are going to find yourself lost for most of the book. I had read quite a bit about Gauguin before reading this book, but I am sure there will be many readers out there who haven't.
THE WAY TO PARADISE is far from being a biography of Gauguin, which is what I think a lot of readers are going to expect. I liked Vargas Llosa's choice of not giving us a standard biography, but I think he should have placed his flashbacks a little nearer the beginning of the book so readers who didn't know much about the life of Gauguin would feel less disoriented.
We eventually learn about Gauguin's service in the French Navy and his work in the office of a stockbroker. Vargas Llosa touched on the artist's marriage to the Danish woman, Mette Gad and, after she leaves him to return to Denmark, his time in Pont Aven with van Gogh. The time spent with van Gogh comprises some of this book's most compelling reading.
The facts of Gauguin's years in Tahiti will be familiar to some readers and unfamiliar to others. I think, if one is not at all familiar with Gauguin and still wants to read THE WAY TO PARADISE, he or she would do well to read a standard biography of Gauguin first. I've heard some criticism of Vargas Llosa's writing in the sections depicting Gauguin's years in Tahiti as being "too flamboyant." Personally, I liked the writing style and thought it fit the subject matter perfectly.
I didn't care for Flora Tristan's story even though she was an interesting woman and a woman well ahead of her time. She was also a much more sympathetic character (at least in this book) than was Gauguin, who wasn't sympathetic at all. I simply wasn't looking for a book that concerned Gauguin's grandmother; I was looking for a book that concerned Gauguin.
Flora Tristan was a woman who, by the age of forty, had already lived a very difficult life. These difficulties, however, certainly didn't lead her into self-pity. Instead, she wrote a little booklet, "The Workers' Union" and became a social reformer, concentrating her efforts primarily on France's working class. I found much that was interesting in the story of Flora Tristan, but I also found it somewhat repetitive and, eventually, boring.
A very interesting section of Flora's story takes place, however, when she decides to go to Arequipa, Peru (the birthplace of Vargas Llosa, by the way), to visit her uncle, Don Pio Tristan. She is treated well by her Peruvian relatives and is made to feel welcome in their home, but she doesn't get what she came after-her share of her father's inheritance. And, being illegitimate, there really is nothing she can do about it. In the Peruvian section, Vargas Llosa's writing style is more baroque and convoluted, something I really liked.
I found the last two chapters, which portray the deaths of Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin, harrowing and heartbreaking, despite my lack of interest in Flora and the almost despicable way in which Gauguin was portrayed. Flora was a woman who suffered much heartbreak in her life and Gauguin, despite his faults, was a tortured soul. Neither deserved the suffering they endured.
Even had I been interested in Flora Tristan (and don't get me wrong, she is an extremely interesting woman), I still wouldn't have liked THE WAY TO PARADISE for two reasons. First, it seems as though Vargas Llosa was trying to marry political ambition to artistic fervor in showing us the very different roads these two people took to what they perceived as "paradise." For me, that marriage just didn't work. Second, and this is the most important reason I didn't care for the book, is the style. As long as Vargas Llosa stayed in the third person, I found his writing as masterful as ever. But he inserts himself as a second person questioner throughout the book and this, at least to me, got to be very, very annoying. I'm certainly not questioning Vargas Llosa's choices here; he's far too masterful a writer for me to do that. I'm just saying that this technique didn't work at all well for me and I disliked it very much. For me, it got in the way of the stories of Flora and Gauguin and caused the book to be less than seamless.
Despite my reservations about THE WAY TO PARADISE, I think anyone interested in Gauguin, or anyone interested in keeping up on the writing of Mario Vargas Llosa, should read this book. You might be like me and find that you don't like it quite as well as you expected to, but there's no doubt that it's an important book, from a very important author.
If you're new to Vargas Llosa (you shouldn't be), I would begin with DEATH IN THE ANDES or THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, a book that is quite complex and baroque, but one that is, I think, Vargas Llosa's masterpiece to date.
Rating: 3
Summary: Detail-Rich Rendering of Gauguin and His Grandmother
Comment: After having been impressed with many new aspects of Gauguin's art in the beautifully curated new show now at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I decided it would be interesting to learn more about Paul Gauguin's final years when he produced what I felt to be his best work. I hoped that The Way to Paradise would be helpful in this regard.
I got more than I expected. The book is actually a novel based on the lives of two people, Flora Tristan, Gauguin's grandmother, as well as Gauguin. Each is told from the perspective of their final years, with flashback reflections. Chapters alternate looking at the two lives. At first, that seemed like a distraction. But later, the artistic design became clearer. Flora Tristan would not have approved of her grandson, and he comes across even less sympathetically than I expected in the context of his family heritage. Although I picked up details about Gauguin that I wanted to learn about the context for his final works, I learned a lot about a remarkable woman about whom I would like to learn more, his grandmother.
Flora Tristan's life epitomizes the evils of the legal system and popular attitudes towards women in those waning decades before women began to earn equal rights. Because her parents' marriage was not a legal one, she could not inherit her father's wealth. Her husband was a brute who was not legally restrained after he committed many wrongs against her and her children . . . but only after he shot her. So she led much of her adult life like Jean Valjean, on the run from the laws which would have returned her and her children to the abuser. In the process, she developed a remarkable sensitivity to the downtrodden, including other women, slaves and industrial workers. She often dressed as a man to go places where women were not allowed or to pursue her goals of social reform. During a visit to England, she was encouraged by the Chartist movement to imagine a European-wide coalition of workers that would lead to reform. In pursuing her hopes for creating a better life on earth, she spent her final months while very ill recruiting workers for her union despite official resistance to her proselytizing. In one remarkable sequence, she traveled alone to Peru from France in hopes of gaining some of her father's estate.
The book focuses on Gauguin's life from the time he first set out for Tahiti. You find out more about his interest in the native customs and his relationships with the people there than about his art. The story focuses on his physical and mental deterioration as syphilis ravaged his body. Despite warnings that he was infectious, he sought sexual gratification from a series of young women (and any other woman who would make herself available). He comes across as the worst sort of abuser, the sort his grandmother would have hated. His vision was of a primitive past that was more fundamental and pure than the present, to be found in expired Maori practices that he cannot contact.
The contrast between the two lives is very powerful beginning around the middle of the book. Until then, I was often puzzled by why the book developed that way.
I found two things to be unpleasant about reading the book. First, the author assumed that I knew a lot more about Gauguin's life than I did. So many of the early details were only revealed in flashbacks near the end of the book. They would have been much more interesting and relevant if portrayed much earlier. The flashbacks themselves were put in as extended ruminations about the past. As such, these flashbacks didn't work well in some cases. They made both characters seem overly introspective. Gauguin, in particular, struck me as someone who was probably not very introspective at all.
Second, there is a lot of editorializing that comes in like an awkward third character. In most cases, the editorializing seems to add nothing to thoughts I had already had . . . such as how a married man acquired syphilis. I suspect that it would have worked better to have either skipped writing these sections or to have them develop as part of dialogue with another character. Here's an example: "The game of Paradise! You had yet to find that slippery place, Koki. Did it exist? Was it an illusion, a mirage?"
The immense number of details about daily life of the two main characters is impressive. With those details, you feel closer to the characters than you could have imagined considering that they led much different lives than most of us do now.
I was pleased to find that the book described the circumstances around the creation of many of the art works that I was most interested in. Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to have the background in art to fully engage in describing the artistic processes that Gauguin used. Such a focus would have made the book much more appealing to me.
So, despite my reservations, I do encourage you to read the book.
When you finish, think about where you see the potential for paradise.
Rating: 5
Summary: Will The Real Gauguin Please Stand Up ...
Comment: I remember as a young man reading The Moon and The Six Pence by Somerset Maugham and being intriged by the persona of Gauguin , and now Mario Vargas Llosa took me to another level of Gauguin's life and I am impressed by such a good novel , connecting Gauguin , Gauguin's grandmother , France , Peru and Tahiti with such finese and style . A book worth reading as history , social evolution and the Lost Paradise we look for in Religion ( Is Not There , Believe Me ) . By the way , if U want to know where Paradise went , read The Story of B , by Daniel Quinn . Enjoy and learn ....
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Title: Living to Tell the Tale by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, EDITH GROSSMAN ISBN: 1400041341 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary by Mario Vargas Llosa, Natasha Wimmer ISBN: 0374183260 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 18 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee ISBN: 0670031305 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Feast of the Goat: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, Edith Grossman ISBN: 0312420277 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 09 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Goya by ROBERT HUGHES ISBN: 0394580281 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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