FICTION
Of elusive peace
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`In the hands of the Latin American magical realist, Gauguin's story has been transmuted into a lush story of frenzy, in vivid chromatic colours.'
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IN the advice he gave a young novelist recently, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa quoted the prose stylist Azorin to stress a point: "The man of letters writes prose, correct prose, classical prose, and yet that prose is worth nothing without the leavening of grace, worthy intent, irony, disdain or sarcasm." He was quick to point out that though he was a great essayist, Azorin was a poor novelist.
In his latest work, Llosa has picked up the story of the sailor, stockbroker and weekend painter who abandoned his wife and bourgeois family to discover the primitive in Brittany and then left for French Polynesia, to Tahiti, the story of the celebrity artist who was to set a new trend in modern painting. Paul Gauguin's life has been written about extensively, the most well known being that of Maugham. But in the hands of the Latin American magical realist, this has been transmuted into a lush story of frenzy, in vivid chromatic colours.
The paradise that Gauguin landed in was not in any way the pristine island he had imagined it to be but a colonial backwaters of decadence, which had already been infected with "the disease of civilisation". Though he accepted a menial bureaucratic job to pay his hospital bills, Gauguin also discovered in the place dramatic scenes and themes. Llosa describes the precise moment when the painter gets the inspiration to create his masterpiece Manao Tupapau, when he strikes a match to find a adolescent Maori girl, one of his models, in the midst of her nightmares. "The sight of her startled look should retain in his memory as one of those visionary moments," he writes.
Like Llosa, Gauguin was born in Peru and he links it cleverly with a parallel narrative of the painter's grandmother Flora Tristan, the fiery revolutionary and feminist, who drove herself at such a frenetic pace that she was dead by the age of 42, four years before the painter was born. Her bleak childhood and youth, when she was shot at by her estranged husband who also abused and hounded her so that she had to flee to Peru, forms the counterpoint for the painter's journey.
Interweaving the stories of the protagonists, the painter of polychromatic totem figures of the South Seas and the puritanical woman who, fed on the social theories of Charles Fournier and Saint Simon, wants to rally women for her Workers' Union, Llosa gives full scope for displaying his "leavening of worthy intent, disdain and sarcasm".
When Tristan reaches Peru she receives at her uncle's feudal kingdom a lavish reception but when she asks for her share of inheritance of her illegitimate Peruvian father, the feudal order bares its real face. She is told unambiguously that as a relative she was welcome but she would get nothing of her own to take away.
Her return to France and attempts to organise workers and women meets with equal scepticism as well as hostility. From one bleak French city to another, from the bleakest of slums in London, she drags herself, getting little response and, drained of health and in utter poverty, dies unheralded. Just as the painter, his body shrivelled by disease and in almost penury, sails back to France where he too perishes.
Llosa's prose is lush and he uses magic realism to telling effect. In alternating chapters he narrates the melancholy story of the two historic figures, both ill tempered and with a knack for alienating people. They try to find peace, one away from Europe where "art was failing, infested by consumption" by a revitalising bath in the primitive cultures, where an earthen paradise still existed, and the other to escape the equally hostile family and society. Both end up finding that the paradise they were searching for was an illusion, one a colonial backwaters and the other still under the yoke of feudalism. Llosa doesn't miss the opportunity to slip in a bit of the periodic civil wars that Peru went through in the 19th Century.
With sympathy and cunning, Llosa weaves a rich elegy for the pair of dreamers, "where they came from, and where they went". His accounts are sometimes tortuous as when he describes the conditions in the slums of Peru or Marsalis, or when he dwells on the illness of Gauguin in suppurating detail. At such times one wishes for some minimalist relief. Equally irritating are his intrusions, the second person interrogation of the author, a clever device but used here too frequently. "Relinquish bourgeois society which caused you great hardships, Paul?" or "Oh, Florita, this miserable body of yours couldn't keep pace with your anxiety, your plans, your will," occur once too often.
The Way to Paradise, Mario Vargas Llosa, Faber and Faber, £7.75.
S. SIVADAS
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