La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977) is a novel by the celebrated Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. The main narrative is about the love affair between the protagonist, Mario Vargas, and a Bolivian friend of the family, Aunt Julia. Mario is only 18, he works at a local radio station in Lima scripting the hourly news bulletins. He is also a halfhearted law student but he dreams of becoming a literary writer. Aunt Julia is a divorcee in her mid 30s. This central part of the novel is somehow autobiographical. Apart from the love affair, there is the famous Bolivian writer of radio soap operas, Pedro Camacho, who in spite of working almost non-stop on his writing, strikes a friendship with Mario.
This main narrative is interrupted by chapters which loosely connected plots could well be lifted from Pedro Camacho's soaps but, actually, are a great show of Vargas Llosa's skills as a short-story writer. This is a novel full of humour but also passion and intrigue, as any good soap opera.
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