Book Review

Paradise in the Other Corner
Book summary of Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel.

By Alejandra Gomez

For Flora Tristán, a pioneer of feminist socialism, freedom was an egalitarian and just society.

For her grandson, Paul Gauguin, great painter and founder of the “synthetism” movement, freedom was returning to a primitive world where physical beauty and pleasure were the only guiding factors.

“El Paraiso en la Otra Esquina”, the latest novel written by Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa tells the lives of the two main characters, both famous personalities after their deaths, their rather futile attempts to find true freedom and paradise on earth.

Flora had an extremely wealthy childhood, having lived her first years in a privileged upper-class family in Peru, in what she later called a “bourgeois” lifestyle. This part of her life crumbles, however, when her father dies, leaving Flora and her mother to fend for themselves in absolute poverty, since her father’s family will not consider her parents’ marriage “legitimate”.

At sixteen years of age, Flora was forced to marry her boss, André Chazal, twelve years her senior, who subjected her to all kinds of abuse during their four years of marriage.

Flora eventually flees the marriage, surviving a murder attempt from her husband that leaves her with a bullet in her chest as a permanent reminder of her suffering. Nevertheless, Flora, a constant fighter, is determined to study and develop her ideas, inspired by the utopian socialists of early nineteenth century France, ultimately publishing several controversial books like “Trips through England” and “The Worker’s Union”.

Flora dies prematurely at 41 years of age, cutting short an educative and motivational tour of France, where she was trying to unite the women and the working class. It is in Flora’s last days that she begins a reflection of her entire life, which Vargas Lola uses as a literary tool to tell her story.

Paul Gauguin, Flora’s grandson also tells us his story from his deathbed in the Marquises Islands, alone and without family, where he is slowly dying from syphilis without ever having been recognized for his (now famous) paintings.

Born in France in 1848, Paul, like Flora, spent part of his childhood in Reequip, Peru, and it is here that Paul develops a great love for primitive cultures, a love that later causes him to leave the life he knows behind when he finds no appreciation for his art among the artistic elite of Paris.

Paul leaves France and his family to find in Tahiti what he thinks will be the paradise of primitive cultures that he was so obsessed with. Instead, Paul is disappointed to find that European civilization has “contaminated” this French Polynesian island. He is upset that ancient rituals like cannibalism and uninhibited sexual relations are almost extinct.

He leaves once again, hopeful that in the more remote Marquesas Islands he will be able to find his primitive paradise, but is once again disappointed, this time for the last time, as he remains here until his death from the “unmentionable disease” (syphilis) in 1903.

It was in the Polynesian islands that Paul created his greatest works of art such as Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of Death Watching) and Where Do We Come From, Who Are We, Where Are We Going?

Perhaps it is the title of this last painting that best depicts the search of the main characters, what is our purpose here and where can we find paradise? For them, this unattainable paradise is a place where human beings are not condemned to live under the rules and norms dictated by society such as injustice, inequality, (in the case of Flora) and restrictions and sombreness of European civilization.