Mario is, despite the title, the principal focus of interest in the novel, which covers a brief period in his life and examines the widely different effects that both Julia and the scriptwriter have upon him. This novel of the education of a young man focuses not only upon his sensations and ideas but also upon his improbable actions and their sometimes hilarious consequences for him. Although several of the minor characters, chiefly his relatives and his companions at the radio station, do, in fact, have their own existences and concerns, one sees them predominantly through Mario’s eyes and in relation to his own growth, concerns, and aspirations. In his painstaking characterization of his friends and relatives and in his precise details of the urban geography of Lima, Mario the narrator consistently views his environment personally, in relation to his sense of it and its meaning for him. In this sense, he is as much “the scriptwriter” of his own life, times, and place as Pedro Camacho is the scriptwriter of dozens of domestic and civil tragedies and melodramas of his contemporary Lima. Further, both Camacho and Mario are the creations of Mario the novelist.

As the young Mario makes his way through these few weeks and months of this extraordinary period in his life, he examines his journalistic apprenticeship at Radio Panamerica and the disparate writing assignments that he undertakes to help support Julia and himself as prologues to his Stephen Dedalus-like flight to the artistic Mecca where he aspires to work: Paris.

Pedro Camacho, the celebrated Bolivian scriptwriter who soon becomes a household word in Lima, is a prime example of one who creates his art for its own sake. Steeped in a devotion to his work that would have done credit to such prodigious creators of fictional worlds as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Charles Dickens, Camacho finds his characters moving away from him, assuming independent lives of their own, jumping from one serial to another, and finally ending in chaotic and apocalyptic episodes that evidence the deterioration and madness of their creator. Camacho is a highly comic character whose outrageous characters complement his own absurdly melodramatic view of himself and of life. It comes as an amusing but somewhat shocking revelation to Mario that Camacho begins to dress like his characters, male and female, so that he can better interpret them in his stories. It is a darker and more sober revelation that Camacho has a wife who is Argentine and who keeps food on their table through utterly unromantic prostitution.

Of great interest, at times of greater interest than Mario, is the wonderful Aunt Julia, as perfect a foil to the numerous stereotypes of Spanish American Princesses (SAP’s) as can be found in Latin American fiction written by men. Independent, witty, beautiful, intelligent, resourceful, charming, arch, and eminently commonsensical, the thirty-two-year-old Julia entirely captivates the young Mario, concedes to a marriage on the condition that it will last at least five years, and shares his dreams, hardships, difficulties, and ultimately his achievement of the goal to live the life of a writer. In the wry final chapter one learns that the marriage really was a success and lasted longer than “all the parents and even she herself had feared, wished or predicted: eight years.” At this point Julia fades, her function in the work now accomplished. With her fades a time of hope and joy in Mario’s narrative; the remainder is the “real” world of his present in a new and ostensibly confining marriage and in a sentimental journey back to Lima and the...