The tone, perfectly conveyed in Edith Grossman’s virtuoso translation, is amused and theatrical — realism that never asks the reader to forget it has been neatly contrived ... To tell his story, Vargas Llosa employs the familiar telenovela technique of alternating chapters among different characters, allowing the destinies of the lowborn and the high, the powerful and the powerless, to intersect in ways they themselves never see ... The book’s 'happy' ending reflects its author’s belief, perhaps, in the power of individual morality and will.
No deep soil is overturned in The Neighborhood, but two things keep one turning the pages. For one, it’s a confident book and confidence is contagious. It’s filled with cliffhangers...and over-the-top incident. For another, it is warm to the touch, particularly as regards sex ... In The Neighborhood, the sex is hot and the beer is cold ...They eat at a seafood place called Seven Deadly Fins. In a novel as contrived and uneven as this one, the human touches go a long way.
Mixing a flair for pulpy dialogue and even pulpier characters, Vargas Llosa manages to convey empathy for that seediest of figures, the tabloid journalist. In venturing into genre territory, Nobel Prize–winner Vargas Llosa finds a sweet spot with this textured thriller that will appeal both to his established audience of literary-fiction readers and to fans of international crime novels.
At first glance, The Neighborhood is a thriller begging for more thrill. Vargas Llosa’s prose — at least in Edith Grossman’s workmanlike translation — is here flaccid and uninspired. What should perhaps be the most salacious details of Enrique’s sordid affair — a brazen orgy conducted under the influence of cocaine — reads instead like third-rate erotica ... His descriptions of the day-to-day fears of average Limeños — arrests, beatings, brutal murders — are crisp and wholly believable. The author is superbly skilled at demonstrating how class and race intersect to privilege or undermine ordinary Peruvians. While little sympathy is felt for the Miami-trotting, navel-gazing world of Enrique and his set, this perhaps is Vargas Llosa’s intention.
The opening exchanges of The Neighbourhood, where best friends Marisa and Chabela are in bed in 1990s Lima, are so floridly graphic...that reading them in public may cause some heat under the collar ... Marisa and Chabela are both happily married, to Enrique and Luciano, living comfortable lives attended to by butlers and maids, as they take Italian classes, go to lunch and relax at the movies. Their worlds are about to be turned upside down, however, and it’s such soap operatics that lend The Neighbourhood its atmosphere of an X-rated telenovella ... It’s the salacious stories of the wealthy that propel what is still an enjoyable, if uneven, page-turner of a novel to its odd conclusion. Llosa’s craft is only intermittently on display here, but he still has the power to enthral.
Ever since Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), Vargas Llosa has ingeniously deployed the erotic intrigues, high-society secrets, and pot-boiling plot twists of the Latin American telenovela. He spices this latest brew as robustly as ever. The wives’ transgressive trysts betray a soft-porn sensibility ... By no means his subtlest work, The Neighbourhood — punchily translated by the ever-excellent Edith Grossman — still pulses along with a zest and cunning not commonly found among octogenarian Nobel laureates.
The Peruvian journalists in Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s erotic and darkly comic The Neighborhood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 244 pages, $26) are a seedy lot, tabloid types trafficking in scandal and blackmail ... The Neighborhood, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is set in the 1990s, during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, whose government took extreme measures to eliminate subversive factions ... The power-elite types in this titillating thriller (by an author who is himself a former political candidate) manage to pursue their sybaritic pleasures throughout all crises, while less advantaged players struggle to exist in safety. But in Mr. Vargas Llosa’s telling, the good, the bad and the vulgar all get their just deserts in surprising and largely gratifying ways.
The characters that Vargas Llosa conjures up to propel a plot through malicious gossip are either repulsive, obnoxious, or pathetic ... The Neighborhood is an audacious descent into the mean streets of Lima, and employs Vargas Llosa’s trademark interlacing dialogue – a montage of separate conversations. But it is an indelicate literary stunt that lacks the operatic eloquence of Conversation in the Cathedral, The War of the End of the World, and The Feast of the Goat – when Vargas Llosa made his pages sing.
Llosa’s lively novel belongs in the pantheon of guilty pleasures by Nobel winners ... While for most of the novel the prose is straightforward and in the manner of a page-turner, toward the end, Llosa includes an extended fugue of his trademark interweaved dialogue to great effect. Reminiscent of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice in its use of genre fiction for higher purposes, this is an audacious and skillful novel.
The story’s strongest moments and characters revolve around the impoverished Barrios Altos neighborhood of Lima, especially Shorty and Juan and a few minor characters. By comparison, the lurid, telenovela lives of the wealthy supply only broad, unresolved ironies about class—in more than one definition—and some cringe-inducing sex scenes. A colorful but confusing and ultimately disappointing work by a great writer.
