Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

A companion to the scandalous bestseller In Praise of the Stepmother, Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel is "an amazingly seductive work" (San Francisco Chronicle).

The boundary between physical reality and the imagination has been at the heart of literature in Spanish ever since Don Quixote. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, his most generous and ambitious novel in years, Mario Vargas Llosa draws on that tradition to explore the possibilities of imagination in our own time.

Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle: Don Rigoberto himself, by day a gray insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast; his second wife, Lucrecia; and his young son, Alfonso. Husband and wife are estranged because of a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and the boy, a fey, angelic creature who may have seduced her (rather than the other way around). Missing Lucrecia terribly, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies, and unsent letters; meanwhile the boy visits Lucrecia, determined to regain her favor and win her love. The resulting novel, an intoxicating mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.

"Exuberant . . . a roguish and sophisticated sex comedy." --Time