8 - The erotic novels: In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

Summary

Sexual themes figure prominently in all of Vargas Llosa's novels. In many of his essays and in some of his creative writings, he has been influenced by Georges Bataille's views on the erotic. However, the erotic is not only of aesthetic interest to him; it also has moral and even political implications. As he indicates in an epigraph for an illustrated book, Erotic Drawings: ‘Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.’ That being said, as a writer of erotic narrative fiction, he is primarily identified with two novels, In Praise of the Stepmother (Elogio de la madrastra, 1988) and its sequel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto, 1997).

Differences and similarities

Although they are intended to be read as companion pieces, obvious differences separate the two works. The Stepmother consists of 149 pages divided into fourteen chapters and an epilogue, with six chapters each incorporating a colour reproduction of a famous painting. The novel operates on two principal levels of reality: the ‘actual’, which consists of an objective, third-person narration of episodes occurring in a household in contemporary Lima; and the ‘mythical’, in which the paintings seem to come alive and address the reader in the first person. The Notebooks consists of 304 pages divided into nine chapters and an epilogue, with each chapter structured symmetrically into four sections, except for Chapter 2, which includes a fifth section as a follow-up to its second section.