Vargas Llosa, Mario

New York. 1986. December 1986. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st Printing. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374230773. Translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat. Author photo by Alicia Benwides (1982). keywords: Literature Translated Peru Latin America France. FROM THE PUBLISHER - A handful of fictional characters have marked my life more profoundly than a great number of flesh-and-blood beings I have known,' Vargas Llosa writes, but with none of them ‘have I had as clearly passionate a relationship as Emma Bovary.' His devotion to her, the novel, and its creator, ever since he first read Madame Bovary during his student days in Pads, when he had ‘very little money and the promise of a scholarship,' has been so complete that he has written an entire book about them. The Perpetual Orgy is his first nonfiction book to appear in English. The book's first section, ‘An Unrequited Passion,' is a tête-a-tête with Emma Bovary The second, ‘The Pen-Man,' traces the gestation and birth of the novel, as well as Flaubert's method, his mania for documentation, and the novel's literary sources. The third, ‘The First Modern Novel,' situates Madame Bovary in literary history. Only the greatest of novels deserves, or can support, this kind of analysis. It is a tribute to THE PERPETUAL ORGY (Flaubert's phrase for losing oneself in literature) that it sends the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest. inventory #5493 ISBN: 0374230773.