BOOK REVIEW: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. It is time to review my book club pick for February: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa. Thank you for stopping by.

Introduction

Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto) is a novel by the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, first published in 1997. It is the sequel to Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother), published in 1988. Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother) is the story of how the conjugal bliss and happiness of don Rigoberto and his second wife Lucrecia is destroyed by the subtle and manipulative harassment of Fonchito (Alfonso), don Rigoberto’s son. This book explores themes of sexuality, erotic fantasies and sex as well as and the loss of innocence.

Fonchito is the personification of polar opposites: purity and perversion. He is young (not ten years old yet (or 13? It is never clarified)) and he has such an angelic face that no one would ever think that he is not an innocent child. Yet behind that beautiful face, cherubic even, hides a boy who uses his intelligent and Machiavellian mind as an irresistible weapon of seduction. Fonchito is the epitome of someone who seems innocent yet hides malicious intent and the author writes this ambiguous character very well. Lucrecia, unfortunately, is no match for her stepson’s devious and unscrupulous mind and she falls prey to his seduction. Their (sexual) encounter or liaison, however, breaks the family apart and Lucrecia and don Rigoberto separate.

What is Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto) about?

When Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto) begins, Lucrecia and don Rigoberto have been separated for six months. One day, however, Fonchito shows up at Lucrecia’s front door with the intent of getting his father and stepmother back together. Visibly unperturbed by the fact that he was the cause of Lucrecia and don Rigoberto’s separation in the first place, Fonchito is overly confident of his ability to persuade them and only cares about one thing: to make his father happy again. This is because, ever since they broke up, he says, his father has been extremely sad and misses her dearly. At first, Lucrecia is affronted. Fonchito’s behavior is that of a child who thinks he has done nothing wrong and she thinks that he is a cynic coming to her house behaving as if nothing had happened. But, yes, Fonchito does indeed think that he has done nothing wrong (as children are wont to do) and he doesn’t see his sexual relationship with Lucrecia as the catalyst that it is. For him, the encounter was a game. An exciting game, but a game nonetheless. His conscious is clear. What he cares about now is making his father happy again.

Lucrecia, however, has not forgotten how and why she is in this predicament and she is wary of the child’s intent. Her caution nonetheless slowly turns into acquiescence, and she soon finds herself receiving a number of anonymous letters that eventually make her believe that maybe, just maybe, Rigoberto does indeed want to reconcile with her.

Narrative Style

Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto) is an epistolary novel that merges the reality of the present with memories of the past creating the illusion that the events of the story occur in a simultaneous manner. Consequently, the author is able to combine the description of reality and mundane activities with personal reflections on various topics and intimate erotic fantasies. He uses letters and diary entries to alternate between don Rigoberto’s philosophical musings and his sexual fantasies, and is thus able to explore his characters’ sex life and sexuality. The demarcation between these real events and intimate dialogue, however, which sometimes shifts between present and past conversations, is not clear.   

Vargas Llosa’s narrative style stands out though for his superb use of ecphrasis.  Ecphrasis is a verbal and literary description of visual art. Often defined as “the verbal representation of visual representation”, the purpose is to “make the reader ‘see’ a painting, sculpture, or scene through words.” Melville uses this technique in the fifth chapter of Moby Dick when he describes the painting in the Spouter Inn. In Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), Vargas Llosa integrates detailed descriptions of various works of arts, more specifically and frequently paintings by Egon Schiele, an artist that Fonchito is obsessed with and whose paintings are a detonating device for the description of the novel’s most erotic scenes.

Character Analysis

Don Rigoberto

Don Rigoberto is often described as a “gray insurance executive by day and a pornographer and sexual enthusiast by night”. What stood out to me the most though was that he is a man deeply in love with his wife. A man hurt by what happened between Lucrecia and his son, yes, but that doesn’t mean that he loves his wife any less. His wife is the woman who features in every one of his fantasies and the only one with whom he doesn’t need to hide himself from. And he misses that intimacy with her as well as the expression of their physical love.

Rigoberto symbolizes the pursuit of pleasure and escapism from a dull and mundane life; this escapism is pursued through art and literature. He also uses the power of imagination to bear with the fact that life, specifically, his life as an insurance executive, is ordinary and crowded with routine. His preference is that of artistic representation and fantasy over reality.

Lucrecia

Lucrecia is the personification of beauty, sexual desire, and moral ambiguity. Although she tries to resist her stepson’s advances at first and to convince herself several times that Fonchito couldn’t possibly be bad behind that angelic face, she is incapable of stopping him and eventually falls prey to his trap: she sleeps with him, and the encounter breaks her marriage to Rigoberto apart. In Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), she is again incapable of reading Fonchito’s intent and knows very well that if he were to seduce her once more, she would sleep with him again.

Fonchito

Like I said earlier, Fonchito is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother, heuses a school assignment to tell the story of his sexual encounter with Lucrecia and incriminates her for the act without remorse. He does this because he knows that everyone will blame her and he will be seen as the victim. Let me note here that what Lucrecia did is indeed a crime. But Fonchito’s total indifference towards Lucrecia in this part of the novel, whence he adored and idolized her before, is what truly stands out. In Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), Fonchito, however, is in his best behavior. He wants to get his parents back together and sets up a ruse where both of them receive anonymous letters making each one of them think that the other is still in love and lusting for them. We do not know that Fonchito is the author of these missives, however, until the last chapter of the novel when Rigoberto and Lucrecia are finally reunited and we see how it is Fonchito who moves the pieces of the game. In this book, the good side of Fonchito prevails (as opposed to the bad in the Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother))and he redeems himself by getting Rigoberto and Lucrecia back together.  

Justiniana

Justiniana is Lucrecia’s maid and she is her mistress’s guilty conscience; the one that stomps some sense into her and who reminds her of the reality she is in and why.

Themes

Blurring of reality and fantasy

In every chapter, we are privy to one of don Rigoberto’s sexual fantasies. In these fantasies, Lucrecia takes central stage and we experience the act of the reading them alongside don Rigoberto as he peruses through his notebooks. These passages are an “ode to pleasure” and the author “skillfully dupes us into the possible reading of realities, sometimes fusing separate times and locations as if characters are almost ghost-like entities observing from the edges of darkened rooms” (Review for The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Joel Seath).

The role of art in sexuality

Art is used in this novel to enhance the characters’ sexual experiences and perceptions. Both Rigoberto and his son are art aficionados and connoisseurs, but it is Fonchito who is obsessed with Egon Schiele, an Austrian painter that died in 1918; he is so obsessed with this painter that the little boy sees himself as the artist’s alter ego. Egon Schiele was a genius fascinated by what was prohibited, most prominently, sex and his own transgressing sexuality, and this duality is prominent in every single one of his paintings. Egon Schiele’s importance in this novel goes beyond however. Fonchito is obsessed with him because he too sees himself as two different people in one body: the good and the bad; the angel and the beast.  

The questioning of moral conventions

In his notebooks, where don Rigoberto writes down his most intimate thoughts and fantasies, don Rigoberto also challenges and critiques established rules of society and the morals embedded in them. These rules and morals he places on a balancing scale against his hedonistic philosophies and the first are always left wanting against the principles of eroticism he abides to.

Conclusion

I first read this book in the early 2000s, when I was in college and I liked it more back then. Upon this second reading though, almost 30 years later, I honestly don’t remember why I liked it so much. My main complaint about it today is that Vargas Llosa hints at Doña Lucrecia and Fonchito’s sexual encounter as a gross indiscretion when it is in fact a crime. There is no sugarcoating it, and referring to it by a different label doesn’t make it any less of a crime. Fonchito’s twisted relationship with Lucrecia was something that I couldn’t digest completely this time around, particularly because Fonchito is a child pervert. And finally, I didn’t like any of the characters. Yes, the novel is a manifesto of sex seen through the beauty of art and literature but, though I tried, I just couldn’t connect with Rigoberto or Lucrecia at all.

Rating

I Didn’t Like It And I Will Not Read this Book Again.

Thank you for stopping by again. My next post will be a review for Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson, followed by my monthly wrap-up for February.