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Vargas Llosa, Mario (Author) & Edith Grossman (Translator) : The Bad Girl

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York City, NY, 2007

ISBN 0374182434

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 276 pages. The author's fifteenth novel. One of Mario Vargas Llosa's finest achievements. The first appearance of the title in English and in the United States. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Bad Girl" in a felicitous English translation. His "remake" of "Madame Bovary", the single most influential novel on the author's art. As such, it is one of several homages to Gustave Flaubert and his masterpiece, which includes "The Perpetual Orgy" (1986), "In Praise of The Stepmother" (1990), "The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto" (1998), and even "The Feast of The Goat" (2001). "The Bad Girl" also bears a striking resemblance to Luis Bunuel's great last film, "That Obscure Object of Desire" (1977). Like Flaubert and Bunuel, Mario Vargas Llosa is a stylist, a critic of power, and a sensualist; for all three artists, erotic and romantic desire is the Good Side of the bad side of life called power. The protagonist's idealizing obsession - what Ricardo is willing to do and to sacrifice in order to attain his elusive object of desire - is incarnated in various femme fatales and played out against the tragic backdrop of History. "Bold, dynamic, and endlessly productive imagination. The canvases of these lives light up with the glow of his passion" (San Francisco Chronicle). His aesthetics and literary practice - Vargas Llosa has embraced and appropriated every literary genre - prompted Roberto Bolano, his greatest successor, to consider him an inescapable influence, among a handful of others, on contemporary Latin-American literature. That is to say, to be a Latin-American writer is to become a Classical master of language and a Modernist artist, writing in language of the highest quality and reinventing literary form and convention at the same time. Literary genres are inventions of a particular culture's idea of imagination and storytelling, "templates" that Vargas Llosa transforms into "poetic tales" (in Harold Bloom's brilliant phrase). An absolute "must-have" title for Mario Vargas Llosa collectors. This copy is very boldly and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Mario Vargas Llosa. It is signed diretcly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. It is also very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen-marker on the same page by his great translator, Edith Grossman. This title is a great book. As far as we know, this is the only such double-signed copy of the First American Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Among "Boom" writers, Mario Vargas Llosa has been grossly under-valued for the longest time even though he rarely does public signings. The collectible value of his books will not only keep but keep going up. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of the Cervantes Prize, awarded to the greatest living writers in Spanish by the Spanish Government, in 1994. Winner of the Jerusalem Prize in 1995. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. One of the greatest writers of our time. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER MARIO VARGAS LLOSA TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0374182434.

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