What the Swedes Read: Mario Vargas Llosa

• LAUREATE: Mario Vargas Llosa (2010, Peru)
• BOOK READ: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, translated by Helen R. Lane

In my willy-nilly research following my reading of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the loopy novel by Peru’s esteemed Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa, I stumbled across the news that the book had been adapted for film. The title is changed to Tune in Tomorrow, and the locale is shifted from Lima to New Orleans, and the book’s narrator, a stand-in for Llosa himself, is played by Keanu Reeves. This is not something you see a lot of in the laureate landscape. I don’t think Joseph Brodsky’s To Urania or Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, to name the subjects of two future columns, has an adaptation starring the chiseled, unblinking, hunky star of Point Break, one of modern film’s most guilty pleasures.

The notion of a guilty pleasure kept coming up as I read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and it’s a concept about which I go both ways. Labeling something a guilty pleasure is often a way to brush off work that is immediately engaging—a severely undervalued trait that’s far more difficult to achieve than it looks—in favor of something that’s been declared, often arbitrarily, “serious.” (Agatha Christie has written dozens of novels smarter and livelier than most of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it’s Death on the Nile, not The Basil and Josephine Stories, that’s the guilty pleasure.) On the other hand, my enjoyment of Point Break, late at night and howling with laughter, is made of different stuff than the majestic awe my favorite works of serious art have produced in me. It’s not camp value—Point Break is very well made, for what it is—but it’s a certain sheepish tension that perhaps I ought to be asking more of what I’m enjoying, or that it ought to be asking more of me. Or should I? Keanu Reeves plays a buttoned-up FBI officer who ends up going undercover as a surfer in order to track down a lawless, uninhibited bank robber who represents everything our hero has denied himself. This is plenty for a work of art to offer, and I haven’t even mentioned the parachute scene. This is, really, a great plot. Also, it is ridiculous.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter also has a great plot. Our hero, Mario, is an eighteen-year-old writer with a dull day job in radio who stumbles at first out of boredom and then out of passion into a madcap affair with his aunt (by marriage), whose allure first resembles and...