For those following my Fiction Book Club posts, you know that I've revised my policy (hammered out over many smoke-filled, backroom nights). Instead of just announcing the book, I'm now saying something about the book club's response after we meet. As is the case with most good policies, I failed to observe it in the very first month after my announcement. The reason will be revealed a few paragraphs down. Meanwhile, this month we read (and discussed last night ) Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl translated by Edith Grossman, who's ported much of his work and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (among other Latin American greats) into English. I'm including Grossman's picture here from a Washington Post interview that she gave with another of her translatees, Mayra Montero. Here Grossman explains her process, or at least comments on it. Why include her picture in this post? As thanks for Love in the Time of Cholera, this book, and many others. A life of translation, exquisite work, of which The Bad Girl is yet another.
We were missing a couple of our most stalwart members last night (rumor has it that this was the first club ever missed by two of our co-founders, Tom and Emily) yet we survived a discussion in which seven loved the book, two hated it, and one was mezzamezz. I loved it. In just a few hundred pages, Vargas Llosa manages to span three or four decades, fixate the reader (at least this one) on an obsessive love affair, accurately portray a Paris and London in 1968 that I remember vividly, document Peruvian politics, and bring onto the stage characters who are complex, contradictory, and engaging - just like my friends. Which brings me to this: when I said I knew someone like "the bad girl," I was queried as to who she was. But first: the bad girl (Lily, among other names) is a disturbed, beautiful, exploitative "user," the kind of woman who collects rich husbands. The good boy, Ricardito, as he calls himself in his interior dialogue, becomes fascinated with her when they are still children. Circumstance and coincidence cross their paths over and over through their lives, sometimes by mere happenstance, other times because one or the other, mostly him, seeks the other out.
So whom have I known like the bad girl? I had a gorgeous and brilliant dear friend whose self-esteem and insecurity were so pronounced that she made repeatedly bad choices in men until the right one came along in her mid-30s and she woke up. The bad girl of this novel is not a sympathetic character until you lop off the first syllable - and then her pathetic-ness is overbearing. She thinks a rich man is going to solve her "problem," provide her security, her problem and insecurity being nothing more than what we're all stuck with - being human. I'm about to lose the whole morning if I don't stop here. Read it and tell me what you think.
And, as promised, why did I not post about the last book? Because I couldn't get past about ten pages, which will make the Cormac McCarthy enthusiasts click right out of this blog. The Road, which uncharacteristically I will not even provide a link to, is another of McCarthy's indulgences. We all know the man can write and that he can write about a father's love for a son (ten pages proves it) but beyond that...good lord, McCarthy. Have you ever written a positive paragraph about a woman? Couldn't you have reduced this to about ten pages? I do not understand this writer's appeal. Or what would possess a writer to spend his/her time this way? With this kind of talent - and living in the times we do that call for all of us to pitch in and help, why are you wasting your talent this way? And why do you get awards for it?
Next up for April '08: Old School by Tobias Wolff, which I can't wait to read. It's set at The Hill School in my hometown of Pottstown, Penna., where I went to my first cotillion and to which I wore my first black velvet dress.
