A second rate Salman Rushdie

I just finished reading the novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa. I picked this book up at a used bookstore yesterday, and could only say that it interested me. The book starts beautifully, with the story of an 18 year old Peruvian boy who works for the main radio station and his love affair with an older woman, Aunt Julia. Interspersed between the chapters telling this story are individual chapters that detail the radio serials being written by Pedro Camacho, a comical, tiny, and impossibly prolific writer from Bolivia, riddled with hatred for all things Argentine.

I have read this type of book before, where writers masterfully interweave separate plots to create a whole were the characters intermingle without ever actually meeting. This is not one of those books. The love story between the boy, Mario, and Aunt Julia is trite and barely credible. Mario himself, although the narrator, remains a poorly drawn enigma whose motivations for his actions are muddy. At the end of the book, Camacho has a nervous breakdown from writing too many serials, his radio programs become mixed and incomprehensible, and in the epilogue he is working as a dogsbody at a tabloid paper, and his Argentine hooker wife has re-appeared, neatly wrapping up the only clearly drawn aspect of the character besides his liking for mint-verbena tea.

Great beginnings seem very common, but a great ending is a hard thing to pull off. I felt cheated when I finished this book, and that worst of all feelings, dissatisfied.

Cujo eats The Dome

I love Stephen King. At his best, King creates wonderful vignettes of characters, moments where you see into their lives for one brilliant, lucid second, and then they are gone. Drove down the road, missed the monster, or gruesomely killed. But King is also at heart a softy. Death may come to the innocent, but it comes quickly. The evil are always punished, and punished terribly.

I recently read two King books in quick succession, Cujo and the Dome. Cujo is the tightly written and suspenseful story of a dog gone rabid, holding a woman and her young son hostage in a hot car. The story is tightly paced, keeps you interested, leads you down some unexpected roads, and ends on a tragic, but somewhat uplifting moment.

Now I make it a point to read all the King I can get my hands on except for the Dark Tower series, which are godawful. So when I got a chance to buy The Dome for a couple of dollars at a thrift store, I was pretty happy. I thought it might be like The Stand, a journey into a world that actually seems to be real, moments in human lives that are believable and a satisfying ending. The Dome is gruesome. The characters are nearly impossible to engage with, except for a couple of teenagers who start out appealing and then seem to vanish from the narrative. I wish I could say that I enjoyed it, I love interesting investigations into human behavior under stress, but I ask you, dear reader, did itreally need the aliens?