Peruvian Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa, the last living heavyweight of the Latin American boom that introduced Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortazar to English-speaking readers in the 1960s, has delivered another scathing, titillating novel that pairs erotic adventure and murder mystery with an expose of political abuse.

The Neighbourhood dives into the comfortable lives of two wealthy couples in Lima. The rise of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorial regime and of terrorist groups including Shining Path imperil their easy existence. A friend’s kidnapping shakes the community, but real danger arrives in the figure of Rolando Garro, the editor-in-chief of Exposed, a celebrity scandal rag.

The slimy editor presents Enrique with photographic evidence of an orgy, the engineer’s sole extramarital exploit. Instead of blatant blackmail, Garro offers the photos as a “gift”, later asking Enrique to bankroll and legitimise his publication. Enrique rushes to his best friend, the lawyer Luciano, who advises steady nerves — and to claim the evidence is fake.

At the same time, the men’s wives, pushed to share a bed one night because of a curfew, feel an unexpected spark. Their close friendship transforms into a physical relationship that also rekindles their bonds with their husbands — until the photos of a naked Enrique appear on the front page of Exposed.

Like many of Vargas Llosa’s novels, The Neighbourhood straddles styles, moving effortlessly from soap opera to political thriller. While he exposes the methods of the yellow press and dirty police, he also lingers on sexual acrobatics, on one page leaning into erotica and on the next damning some of Peru’s most powerful figures.

His novels, though, never fall into polemic. Once he convinces the reader of a character’s vile motives, he throws in a dynamic that overturns certainty: suddenly, the villain is a hero, or the honourable man is a putz. It’s a disorienting but energising reminder that intentions can be complicated and commitments slippery.

Events in the novel glide with pulpy buoyancy, but The Neighbourhood doesn’t sacrifice invention for speed. In one of the most fulfilling chapters, Vargas Llosa allows conversations from the various narrative threads to weave in and out of each other across time, intersecting to exciting, illuminating effect.

Vargas Llosa has connected many worlds, not just South America, where he was born and raised, and Spain, where he holds dual citizenship. He challenged power as a young journalist, and continued to do so as a political player whose tendencies have ranged from far left to far right. In 1990, he ran for president of Peru against Fujimori, whose decade-long authoritarian rule ended with a long jail sentence for human rights violations and bribery.

Through all this, Vargas Llosa remained a provocateur. He once referred to Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship” and has spoken against Catalan independence. In one of the many subplots of The Neighbourhood, he renews doubt about Fujimori’s citizenship and eligibility to hold public office in Peru.

Vargas Llosa isn’t immune from the kind of public shaming and gossip mongering he decries — but also celebrates — in The Neighbourhood. His feud with a long-time friend turned enemy exploded when he gave Garcia Marquez’s a black eye. More recently, his relationship with former model and socialite Isabel Preysler, which ended his 50-year marriage, prompted tabloid gossip around the globe.

Indeed, the most fascinating figures inhabiting The Neighbourhood are those in the seedy reporting-as-entertainment industry. Garro’s sidekick, Shorty, does her boss’s bidding without qualm and refuses to accept truth as a barrier. The feckless photographer Ceferino provides a perfect example of a man’s ethics and courage trampled by necessity. The author seems to suggest we need the worst kinds of journalists if we want to protect those who fight for freedom of information, and that perhaps only those willing to soil their hands can upend corruption.

Beginning with his first published novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), Vargas Llosa wrote critically about political and military institutions. His unflinching but lustrous prose about sex, in such works as In Praise of the Stepmother (1990), has shocked and entertained generations. But his 18th novel isn’t a rehash of what he’s long accomplished. At 82, he gives no impression of winding down or losing his edge.

In his Nobel lecture, he described writing as “making love to the woman you love, for days, weeks, months, without stopping”. Again, and with renewed vitality, with ever more to say about our fraught, corrupt world, he combines an ardour for sex and its power with the revolution it can inspire or, at least, fuel.

I couldn't get into this book, despite many attempts to. It was poorly written and the plot was subpar.

First published in Spain in 2016; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 27, 2018

The Neighborhood is set in Peru during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. Noted for corruption and human rights abuses (but also for improving the Peruvian economy and waging war on terror, which accounted for his popularity), Fujimori is a tangential character in The Neighborhood, lurking but never seen.

Two couples who are good friends occupy a good part of the story. Marisa is married to the engineer Enrique Cárdenas. Luciano, Enrique’s friend and lawyer, is married to Chabela.

A curfew forces Chabela to spend the night at Marisa’s house, prompting the onset of erotic sensations when Marisa feels Chabela’s ankle pressed against her own. The two women have a passionate encounter, but Chabela leaves in the morning as if nothing happened. Was it a dream? Marisa isn’t sure, but she’s delighted when Chabela invites her to spend three days with her in Miami.

The curfew is a result of terrorism in Peru that lurks in the novel’s background. The MRTA is kidnapping anyone who might be worth a ransom. Terror instigated by Shining Path has caused many businessmen to flee from Lima, but Enrique has stayed. He has successfully avoided adversity until a reporter delivers disturbing photographs to Enrique of an orgy arranged by a Central European businessman a couple of years earlier. Enrique figures prominently in the photographs.

The reporter, Rolando Garro, makes his living by ruining lives with gossipy tabloid journalism. One life he ruined belongs to an aging artist known as Juan Peineta, a professional reciter of poetry who took a lucrative job on television (the enemy of poetry) as one of the Three Jokers, only to be scorned by Garro. Peineta has vowed revenge.

The three intertwined stories — Chabela’s affair with Marisa, Enrique’s blackmail woes, and Peineta’s anger at Garro — unfold in alternating chapters. One point of the story, as applicable to the US as to Peru, is that people love gossip, particularly when the gossip brings down high society. By being the great destroyer, gossip is the great equalizer.

But the greater point of the story is that power corrupts, and that the powerful control the powerless in ways that are both direct and indirect. In Peru as in other countries, wealth can lead to a corruption of the media when the people who control news outlets use them to advance their own ends.

A chapter near the end brings all the stories together in paragraphs that jump from one story to the next, giving the impression of lives unfolding simultaneously. Fortunately, Mario Vargas Llosa structures the chapter in a way that avoids undue confusion.

Entertaining characters provide comic relief while a fair amount of sex lightens what is in essence a dark story about political corruption that (as one of the characters observes) threatens to turn Peru into a stereotypical banana republic. The ending is satisfying and to the extent that the novel is historically accurate, the ending is historically true.

Yet the lightness, the feel-good nature of the story, also makes The Neighborhood less substantial than its subject matter. Llosa seems to be trying to condemn tabloid journalism while milking sexual entanglements for entertainment value — exactly what the tabloids do. And while Llosa condemns political corruption, he doesn’t give the reader a full sense of just how awful Fujimori was. I enjoyed The Neighborhood, but it is far from Llosa’s best work, and not a book that will sit on the top shelf of South American fiction.

Mario Vargas LLosa’s novel, The Neighborhood is a look at the dirty politics of Peru through the lives of a handful of characters. It’s the 1990s in Peru, Alberto Fujimori is president, and two affluent couples, Marisa and businessman Quique (Enrique), Chabela and lawyer Luciano are good friends. Cachito, who was also in Marisa and Chabela’s stratified circle, was kidnapped two months ago, and his release is currently being negotiated. But even though someone from their circle has been kidnapped, the darker, more terrifying aspects of Peru remain, more or less, a spectacle for these four people:

They were having a whiskey on the terrace, watching the sea of lights of Lima at their feet, and talking, naturally, about the subject that obsessed every household in those days, the attacks and kidnappings of the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the MRTA, the blackouts almost every night because electrical towers had been blown up, leaving entire districts of the city in darkness and the explosions the terrorists used to awaken Limeños at midnight and at dawn. They recalled having seen from this same terrace, a few months earlier, on one of the hills on the outskirts of the city, the torches light up in the shape of a hammer and sickle, a prophecy of what would happen if the Senderistas won this war.

Wealth and status are protections against many of the dangerous aspects of society, but they are also magnets for opportunists, and not long after the book begins, Quique is approached by Rolando Garro, the owner of a sleazy tabloid known for its vicious, career-destroying attacks on various people involved in the entertainment industry. Garro, who has photographs in his possession of an orgy starring Quique, blackmails Quique who then turns to his lawyer and best friend, Luciano for advice.

the neighborhood

The meeting between Garro and Quique unleashes powerful, dark manipulative forces within the Peruvian government, and while a lot of the plot concentrates on the wealthy–Marisa, Quique, Chabela and Luciano, other characters enter the story, including the opportunistic Shorty and the shadowy figure of the Doctor. The character of Shorty (Julieta), a reporter “capable of killing her own mother for a scoop, especially if it was dirty and salacious,” is arguably the most interesting person in this story, and it’s through her that the question is posed: what makes one person corrupt and another take a stand?

Her idea of journalism came from the small yellow scandal sheets displayed in the newsstands in the center of town, which people stopped to read–or rather look at, because there was almost nothing to them beyond the large, glaring headlines–and to contemplate the naked women showing off their buttocks with fantastic vulgarity, and the panels in strident red letters denouncing the filthy things, the pestilential secrets, and the read or imagined vile acts, thefts, perversions, and trafficking that destroyed the reputations of the most apparently worthy and prestigious people in the country.

The book begins with an extended sex scene and while it put me off the book, I pushed on. The sex sub plot is far less interesting than the novel’s political thread, and the somewhat lengthy descriptions of sex seem gratuitous especially since this subplot led nowhere. Ultimately, however, I decided that the trivial drama between these two bored, superficial, decadent society wives, juxtaposed with the reality of Peruvian politics, illuminated the contrast between the classes. Here’s Shorty dragging herself up from the grimiest poverty, doing anything to survive while Marisa and Chabela (in between Italian classes, society dinners and vacations) start an affair. It’s a “how-the-other 1% live” study in contrasts, but still the detailed sex didn’t add to the book’s merit.

Review copy

Translated by Edith Grossman

Imagine a country led by a tyrant who expects everything to go his way, who has powerful henchmen to do his dirty work for him. This is Vargas Llosa’s Peru during Fujimori’s presidency. In this climate Enrique, a powerful entrepreneur, his lawyer and an egocentric tabloid editor grapple with scandal, accountability and morality while negotiating the unspoken expectations of the corrupt president and his muscle, known as the Doctor. Details of the main bawdy scandal are slowly revealed through the story, and other scandal follows. Like all Vargas Llosa books, the storyline and characters are well developed and engaging, right and wrong are nuanced, and no one seems to be particularly upstanding. His is a world of gradation, mostly.

The story starts off with raunchy sexuality, a case of blackmail and other shenanigans. Admittedly, this wasn't the start I was hoping for from a writer I hold in such high esteem. Not until the would be blackmailer is found murdered does the story really start to gain any traction for me.
The later stages of this work focuses in on many layers of corruption, state sponsored intimidation, the importance of an independent and strong media, and the disparities of class in 1990's Peru.
Overall this is merely a good book by a great author and I believe his fans will like it, but not love it. If you haven't read him yet I would recommend starting elsewhere first "The feast of the goat", or "Death in the Andes" are my favorites so far.
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this arc available through netgalley.