The Bad Girl.

Vargas Llosa, Mario (author).

Ricardo Somocurcio is just a teenager when his fate is sealed; he falls in love. Her name is Lily, and she is Chilean, an exotic figure in the upper-class Lima neighborhood of Miraflores. Then the truth comes out that she’s actually Peruvian, and worse, she’s poor. Is her name even Lily? Ricardo wants two things from life: to live in Paris and to be with the “bad girl.” He achieves his first goal, finding steady work as an interpreter and translator, but the bad girl is always tantalizingly out of reach. When he meets her again, she’s en route to Cuba, supposedly to train as a guerrilla fighter. She drifts in and out of his life, changing her identity with each new husband or lover, always finding time to scorn—but still tryst with—her adoring “good boy.” They’re opposites in every way except for their shared lack of true identity. Still, if a masochist and a sadist are a perfect pair, they’re a handsome couple. The endless abuse plays out against the news of distant Peru: coups, dictatorships, insurrections, occasional elections. Vargas Llosa (The Feast of the Goat, 2001) is at his core a political writer, although in this tale of expatriate obsession, any statement may lie in the characters’ political apathy. The repetitiveness of their relationship may lead some readers to call it an early night, but Vargas Llosa’s energetic, sexually charged prose will have others lying awake.