Rating: 
Summary: A funny read
Review: What a wonderfully structured book!. I don't want to go into detail about this as it would give away the game. It is a very funny book about a peruvian radio station in the 50's and the characters who inhabit it. Gives a wonderful flavour of the place .
Rating:
Summary: As good as it gets!
Review: When I really think about it, the worst thing I can say about Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is that I did not want the book to end so soon. Like all great books, the story transported me to another place, in this case it is Lima in the 1950s. Here, aunts like fiction but they don't enjoy literature. And scriptwriters don't write literature, but produce large quantities of fiction.
Before the appearance of television, in Peru, the radio theatre (the ancestor of today's soap operas) was an important presence in the lives of the citizens of Lima. At Radio Central, a scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, uses that stage to manipulate his audience's need for tales of horror and love.At Radio Panamericana, a young news editor cuts articles out of the local newspapers and rewrites them for news bulletins. He checks his collaborator's appetite for catastrophes and falls in love with his aunt, a newly divorced Bolivian who comes to Lima in search for a profitable match.
The book is actually a slightly fictionalized account of Vargas Llosa's life as a university student. His unusual love story gets out of control, just as the prolific Pedro Camacho's radio scripts start to get out of the control.
I enjoyed the narrative a great deal, the interweaving of different stories involving Vargas Llosa's love story and the tales of the eccentric "scriptwriter". His stories have a very important meaning - they are unforgettable depictions of Peru of the '50s, with well drawn characters. They act as representatives of Peruvian society, wealthy or poor, intellectual or not so intellectual, everyone with his or her own shortcomings and problems. They are all presented with tongue in cheek, in a well-written realistic story.
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