The Bad Girl

Otilia Salaverry — the bad girl — meets Ricardo Somocurcio in Lima in 1950 and proceeds to disappear from and reappear in his life over the next five decades, always in a different guise (revolutionary, diplomat’s wife, horse trainer, dominatrix), always more dangerous, always more desired. Ricardo, a decent, unassuming translator based in Paris, cannot stop loving her despite everything she is and everything she does to him.

Vargas Llosa’s late novel is a tribute to Flaubert’s Sentimental Education — a novel about the man who loves rather than the woman who is loved, about the particular masochism of a certain kind of romantic obsession, and about the relationship between desire and self-destruction. It is also, in its evocation of Lima, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Madrid across five decades, a vivid portrait of a century.

Charming, disturbing, and completely compelling — one of the most readable of Vargas Llosa’s later novels. Published by Faber & Faber.