Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a comedic novel about the education of young Mario (called variously Marito and Varguitas) that combines numerous elements of Vargas Llosa’s own life with the fictional relationship with Aunt Julia and Pedro Camacho in Lima in the 1950’s to form an autobiographical fable of identity that is neither autobiography nor history but rather an artistically rendered portrait of the artist as a young man. The primary narrator of the work, Mario, recounts, from a distance of at least twelve years later, his youthful love for his aunt by marriage, their improbable courtship and hilarious attempts to circumvent the law to get married, and his own life as a law student, radio newswriter, and would-be short-story writer. Each of the novel’s twenty chapters, except the last two, which conclude Mario’s narrative, are arranged so that the odd-numbered ones are Mario’s attempts to describe his life and fortunes and the even-numbered ones are actual scripts of soap operas by Pedro Camacho, the indefatigable and prolific Bolivian scriptwriter.

The work begins with a semiserious Mario introducing himself as a student and news director of Radio Panamerica, the lesser of Lima’s two radio stations owned by the Genaro family, with the importation of Pedro Camacho from Bolivia to write original radio serials to replace those which the Genaros brought from Cuba, and with the arrival of the newly divorced Aunt Julia, also from Bolivia. Mario’s initial encounters with Camacho and Julia are equally unpromising but turn out, in true melodramatic fashion, to be important first steps in forming a professional bond between Mario and the scriptwriter and a very personal one with Aunt Julia.

The story of the furtive courtship between Mario and Julia is the central portion of Mario’s narrative, as the two fall quite hopelessly, passionately, and madly in love with each other. Their love, when it is finally discovered after their ill-starred elopement, brings down upon them a family catastrophe that competes, in all of its absurdity and odd manifestations, with elements of Camacho’s soap operas, the stories which are recounted antiphonally throughout the novel. Indeed, the comedy of errors of their elopement—they dash about the countryside to find a mayor who will, for a bribe, marry the underage Mario without parental consent—has exactly enough improbability about it to make it truly resemble the vicissitudes of real life. So does life often resemble bad literature and B-pictures.

Meanwhile, Pedro Camacho’s soap operas make him the toast of Lima: The stories and the fortunes of their characters are on everyone’s lips when Camacho begins to evidence signs of fatigue and then madness. His villains all turn out to be Argentines or Peruvians with Argentinian proclivities. Despite official protests to Radio Panamerica by the Argentine ambassador, Camacho persists in vilifying Argentina and its people. Far more serious is the growing bewilderment among his listeners: Characters who died in one serial are resurrected in another, sometimes with different professions; other characters move in and out of several serials; still others change their names in mid-script. Public confusion and dismay grow as, one by one, the principal continuing characters are killed off in one catastrophe after another until, after a series of disasters, each worse than the one before, all of fictional Lima is destroyed cataclysmically, and Camacho is finally committed to an insane asylum.

The work’s final chapter serves as a neat conclusion to all the cliff-hanger questions about Mario’s narrative and explains what has happened, over a twelve-year period, to Mario, Julia, Pedro Camacho, and lesser characters such as Pascual, Javier, and Big Pablito. In so doing, it serves both to provide a neat summary of much of the novel’s action and to mark a decidedly new phase in Mario’s fortunes.