With his last novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa surprised many of his admirers by joining the literary carnival. Prior to this dizzyingly playful account of an army officer assigned to supply a party of prostitutes to deprived jungle soldiers, the author had produced a stark short-story collection, translated as The Cubs, and three long, increasingly complex novels, The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral, all exploring with a near-savage seriousness and single-mindedness themes of social and political corruption. In the novels, Vargas Llosa employed with great skill a variety of narrative techniques (fractured chronology, interlocking stories, shifts in point of view, cinematiclike cuts, parallel and contrapuntal dialogues) that turned the old social-realist novel upside down and inside out. Though narrative experimentation was still very much in evidence in Captain Pantoja, a new, unexpected element entered Vargas Llosa's work: an unrestrained sense of humor. It was as if the author had decided to join the great big party going on around him.

The fun continues in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, but with some very significant differences. Not only is the new book longer and much broader in scope, but it has a thematic richness and density the other book lacked. The technical fireworks are, surprisingly, kept to a minimum. In fact, this is a relatively restrained performance for the author. Yet he has managed to create a work that is both challenging and absolutely captivating, a multilayered, high-spirited, and in the end terribly affecting text about the interplay of fiction and reality, the transformation of life into art, and life seen and sometimes even lived as fiction. Using as a foundation an actual period in his life during the early 1950s when he was employed as a newswriter for Lima's Radio Panamericana, Vargas Llosa proceeds to work on two distinct narrative planes. On the "real" level he writes in first-person what is, from all reports, a fairly solid autobiographical account of his experiences at the radio station and of his romance with and ultimate marriage to his Aunt Julia, his first wife (to whom the book is dedicated)—an event that created a family scandal as well as a host of problems for the eighteen-year-old Mario and his thirty-two-year-old aunt. On the purely fictive level, he presents what might be described as straight narrative renderings or adaptations of the various soap operas written by Pedro Comacho, an amazingly prolific scriptwriter recently hired by Panamericana's neighboring radio station because of his unique ability and the popular success he enjoyed in Bolivar. The autobiographical chapters alternate with the soap opera chapters, each of which tells a different and ultimately incomplete story (for soap situations are never quite resolved). Most of them are, to say the least, bizarre, even crazy by soap opera standards—from the story of a haunted rodent exterminator whose obsessive mission is to kill every rat in Peru, to the tale of a traveling medical supplies salesman who is persuaded by an unorthodox psychiatrist that he did not run over a child by accident…. (pp. 38-9)

Surprisingly enough, the alternating narrative lines are not as jarring as one might expect. Though the "real" story of Mario and Julia never quite approaches the sheer madness and intensity of Comacho's stories, it too contains the stuff of melodrama: furtive meetings, partings, reconciliations, scandal, family threats, and final flight….

It is worth mentioning that Comacho's stories, though admittedly superficial and fantastic and hardly the stuff of your typical soaps, are quite gripping. So taken are we by these fictions that when Comacho begins to go mad and starts populating one soap opera with characters from another, arbitrarily changing their professions, histories, and relationships, killing them off and resurrecting them at will, we are disturbed by the shattering of the illusion, by, as Comacho's boss so wonderfully puts it, "these modernist gimmicks." After all, the reader takes pleasure in the unreal as well.

At times the reader wishes that aunt Julia were a more substantial creation, and at times he can't quite believe that an unsophisticated hack like Comacho could produce such ingeniously cockeyed scripts or that their physical qualities could have been realized on radio. These, however, are minor qualms. The novel may sometimes recall Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Stanley Elkin's radio novel The Dick Gibson Show, and Puig's campy treatments of characters living B-movie lives. But it is such a clever, complex, and enjoyable work that it very much makes its own special mark. If with his last novel Vargas Llosa joined the Latin American literary party, with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter he becomes, along with his friend García Márquez, the life of that party. (p. 39)