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Vargas Llosa, Mario (Translated by Helen Lane) : The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert And Madame Bovary

Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York City, NY, 1986

ISBN 0374230773

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 240 pages. Book-length account on subject. 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 rare. Presents Mario Vargas Llosa's "La Orgia perpetua" in a felicitous English translation. The culmination of the author's lifelong obsession with Flaubert and his masterpiece. "Deals with the story the novel tells and the sources it uses, the way in which it transforms itself into time and language. Examines the 'added element' Flaubert joined to his perceptions of reality: His humanizing of objects, obsession with pairs, and manipulation of fictional time and narrative. Finally, focussing on such issues as the anti-hero and interior monologue, the author discusses the place of 'Madame Bovary' in the development of the modern novel" (Richard Kuczkowski). Mario Vargas Llosa is the writer/intellectual/philosopher par excellence among the Latin-American geniuses of the so-called Boom: He refuses to be categorized, labeled, and reduced by ideology, whether it is Fascist conservatism, political correctness, or Leftist academicism, what he has condemned as "authoritarianism of the Left and the Right". He considers himself an heir to the great European cultural tradition yet his work is firmly grounded in Latin America's (not just his native Peru's) history and mythology. 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 pen-marker on the title page by Mario Vargas Llosa. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a late-modern classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First American Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a beauty. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws yet are priced as though they had collectible value. 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 0374230773.

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