The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

Rating:
Summary: Notebooks are too weak of a literary device
Review: "The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto" is a demonstrative example of Mario Vargas Llosa's vast imagination. In this book, Vargas Llosa uses the medium of notebooks -- diaries of fantasy, in essence -- to convey a series of sexual and erotic tales, written by his character, Don Rigoberto. Some of the stories are quite compelling and draw in the reader with terrific success. But, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes apparent that the tales in Don Rigoberto's notebooks do not sufficiently intertwine. In fact, they are fantasies, often completely unrelated to the previous, except in their erotic content. As a result, the narrative is not constructed chapter-by-chapter; rather it consists of a hodge-podge collection of freewritings, scribbled in a notebook, and scattered around an ongoing tale (which begins each chapter) of the exotic relationship between his wife and son. Despite the complex fantasies of the notebooks, it becomes apparent that disjointed stories in scrawled notepads, while interesting, are not a sufficiently successful narrative device. The reader is left wanting to see the various parts come together. But most do not.

Rating:
Summary: stories within stories...
Review: ...fantasy within fiction, eroticism within contempt for societal `norms'....

this compelling book is an erotic lace-work of the extremely hedonistic yet solitary don rigoberto's mind of absurd surreal life as insurance drone to his idealistic romance with his wife lucretia. interrupted by devil-child.

the themes within themes of this book are highly complex, including an intriguing introduction to egon schieles' artistry. the surprises are endless, as are his essays from life-as-defined-by leisure to the erotic affects of urination.

it is hard to summarise this novel. it covers so many issues that it is a wonder it is only contained within 259 pages. i was craving so much more at the end. mario vargas llosa is a genius once again.

Rating:
Summary: Delightful!
Review: I was already a big Vargas Llosa fan, but I truly enjoyed this playful, erotic romp through literature, philosophy, psychology, and of course, art. I found getting to know the character of Don Rigoberto fascinating and highly entertaining. His notebook letters (never sent) skewering everyone from jocks to feminists are hilarious, and reveal much about the man who ultimately must make some hard decisions about his life. As many reviewers have pointed out, this is not a book to be read for its page-turning storyline, but rather one to be savored and wallowed in. It makes me wish I could read it in the original Spanish. Happy reading!

Rating:
Summary: Imaginative and entertaining
Review: Jilted by his lovely wife, Don Rigoberto becomes a depressed man who sits in his studies to read and put his thoughts on paper. Memories of his beautiful wife are the chief topics of his writings, and so are his perverted fantasies about her. In between these, we are also entertained by some letters written (but never sent) to various people from strangers to celebrities to his neighbours highlighting his grouses about them. Through his writings, a picture begins to emerge on the strange occurrences of him losing his wife.



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Summary: Boston Phoenix review of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
Review: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman (FSG, 259 pages, $23, 1998). by Nicholas Patterson

"I read, look at my pictures, review and add to my notebooks . . . but, above all, I fantasize. I dream. I construct a better reality . . . Only when I am in that world, in that company, do I exist, for then I am joyful and content," (p. 226) explains the title character of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto near the end of the novel. This explanation helps make sense of a novel where the line between fantasy and reality is often blurred and the former seems more real than the latter. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is divided between the story of a bizarre love triangle (Rigoberto, his estranged wife Lucrecia, and his young son Alfonso), the fantasies and letters Don Rigoberto writes in his notebooks, and to a lesser extent Lucrecia's dreams. The Notebooks takes up where Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother (FSG, 1990) left off: Rigoberto and Lucrecia have separated after Rigoberto discovers that Alfonso (or Fonchito) has seduced his stepmother (though Fonchito's age is never precisely given, he is portrayed as being somewhere between 10 and 13 years old). Having succeeded in his seduction and in publicizing it to his father through an essay in the Stepmother, Fonchito decides to reunite Rigoberto and Lucrecia in the Notebooks. Fonchito re-enters Lucrecia's life and through conversations about the life and work of his idol, the painter Egon Schiele, tries to convince her to get back together with Rigoberto. Fonchito provides a further catalyst for the couple's reunion by writing two series of 10 anonymous letters to Lucrecia and Rigoberto which each mistake as being written by their spouse. Intertwined with the story of Fonchito's machinations are a series of Rigoberto's and Lucrecia's late night meditations, fantasies, and dreams. Rigoberto, a mild mannered insurance executive, escapes his mundane reality through elaborate games and fantasies involving his missing wife. Physically faithful to his wife, Rigoberto imagines her in a series of romantic interludes with among others: "a twin brother of mine whom I invented, a Corsican brother, in an orgy. With a castrated motorcyclist. You were a law professor in Virginia, and you corrupted a saintly jurist. You made love to the wife of the Algerian ambassador in a steambath. Your feet maddened a French fetishist of the eighteenth century. . . we were in a Mexican brothel with a mulatta who pulled off one of my ears in a single bite." (p. 253-4) Llosa weaves these fantasies together with real life events so skillfully that it isn't until near the end of the book that one knows what has happened and what has been imagined. This ambiguity between fact and fiction, which Llosa has employed in previous novels including Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, emphasizes the idea that the life of the mind is as, and often more, important than the life of the body. Through imagination one can rise above everyday life and create a world as one wants it to be. Llosa suggests that love arises from being able to share this world with another. When Rigoberto tells Lucrecia about his fantasies near the end of the book, Lucrecia responds: "I want details . . . all of them, even the tiniest. What I did, what I ate, what was done to me." (P. 253) Though The Notebooks is filled with sensual and sexual fantasies it is not pornographic. Llosa pulls off this difficult feat by relating erotic work without resorting to graphic imagery (Rigoberto writes a scathing "Letter to the Reader of Playboy" which rails against people who limit their sexual imagination by relying on pornography). The novel drags a little near the end as Rigoberto delves perhaps a little to deeply into a foot fetish fantasy. However, in general, the book has a very quick and exciting pace, in part due to Edith Grossman's translation. Llosa's The Notebooks is an elegant exploration of the psychology of love and desire.

Rating:
Summary: Notebooks are too weak of a literary device
Review: This is a sequel to "In Praise of the Stepmother," of the love triangle between Don Rigoberto, Lucretia, and Alfonso (Fonchito), returning to the theme of love attraction between a boy and an older female relative. It must be said that this theme has an autobiographical connotation, since Mario Vargas Llosa fell in love and married his much older aunt.
Don Rigoberto belongs to the bourgeois society, a successful businessman who at night pursues his hedonistic, eccenric passions. Separated from his second wife Lucretia, he indulges in fantasies to make up for his longing. Lucretia the devoted wife, whose passions and fantasies rivals those of her husband, has been accused of seducing his angelic and at the same time "luciferian" son Fonchito, a precocious little boy who shows an obsessive interest in Egon Schiele's paintings.
After reading some of Don Rigoerto letters, it becomes obvious to the reader that he is not recounting real experiences but using fantasy to fulfill his loneliness. His narration sometimes becomes tedious and repetitive; fortunately, his fantasy is sometimes broken by some discourses in which he attacks modern society from a variety of angles: patriotism, philosophy, militant feminists, sport enthusiasts, history, etc. Meanwhile, Fonchito applies his knowledge of life and work of painter Egon Schiele to seduce his stepmother's imagination whilst the reader is left to decide whether this young boy is a truly innocent and naive, or a pathological character. The extensive analysis of Schiele's work , details of famaous paintings, and other bits of general culture will add some interest to the narrative, and will compensate for Fonchito's irritating call "stepmamá, stepmamá..."
If it was Mario Vargas Llosa intention to transplant the aesthetic beauty of a classical work of art into literary fiction, the end result falls short of its objective. A work of art will leave the viewer with an open door to fulfill his imagination, whilst "The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto" is utterly saturated with less than artistic fantasy.

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Summary: Funny and thought-provoking
Review: This is what all literature should aspire to--funny, chock full of ideas, and illuminating some of the extremes of human nature. I hope there is a third in the series to come.

Rating:
Summary: In praise of Vargas Illosa
Review: What DON RIGOBERTO lacks in the eroticism of its precursor, IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER, it makes up for in humor and drama. It is a very entertaining if somewhat repetitive book.

Rigoberto, naturally enough, dominates the novel. The wife and son seem a little one or two dimensional and not very developed beyond the first book. But here Rigoberto blazes forth not only as a man of acute erotic passions but as a social critic as well, and his well-measured diatribes against feminists, organized sports, pornography, and men's clubs, of which his eponymous notebooks are composed, are a joy to read.