The Way to Paradise : A Novel

A New York Times Notable Book

Flora Tristán, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return in 1844, she makes her name as a champion of the downtrodden, touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union.

In 1891, Flora's grandson, struggling painter and stubborn visionary Paul Gauguin, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.

Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this double portrait, a rare study in passion and ambition, as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death.

'El Paraíso en La Otra Esquina' is Mario Vargas Llosa's fictionalized, dual biography of the painter Paul Gauguin and of Flora Tristán, a political reformer and writer who was his Peruvian grandmother. Although hampered by several difficulties, this novel makes for a very rewarding read.

The two plot lines never converge, and chapters alternate between the protagonists - switching, for instance, from Flora's rejection of some suitor or her activism in France to an episode from Gauguin's time in Provence or Polynesia. As their lives never intersect significantly, thematic connections must provide the book's unity. I find it extremely hard to believe that our multilingual author could have approved this translation of his title as 'The Way to Paradise: A Novel'. His original reads literally as the not at all wooden, far more eloquent 'The Paradise on the Other Corner'. It is so much richer since it alludes to the elusive goals that each protagonist pursues in a challenging yet largely indifferent world. Both of them flout conventions while trying to realize their aspirations, but each one comes to a solitary, painful end. In other ways they are near opposites: while Gauguin is near-priapic, Flora Tristán finds most sex repellent; social inequities drive her toward a passionate activism, while he's either indifferent to or deeply complicit in his world's injustices.

The novel's dual structure not only raises an issue about its cohesiveness, but also the added difficulty that one plot line may be of more interest than the other: beginning each new chapter, readers will inevitably welcome returning to their preferred plot or regret having to wade through another one before that. Other literary devices pose further challenges or distractions for readers, since they raise unintended questions such as: Is there a reason why this episode follows the previous chapter? Is some symmetry intended in the sequence of chapters? Also: What solution will Vargas Llosa conjure to unravel how the narrator speaks to his protagonists, and will it be satisfying? Unless some kind of gratification emerges from a resolution of these queries they tend to undermine the reader's engagement, blurring our focus on the novel's characters and their doings.

Others in this forum have commented on the second-person remarks that intrude on the narrative, thereby raising questions about their speaker's identity. The narrator addresses Gauguin and Flora, sometimes in almost reproachful or nagging tones: "Was it your ill health that made you so impatient?", "...Te gustó, Andaluza, cuando te halagaba...?", etc. One may understandably begin to expect some crafty, Nabokovian solution to resolve these near-constant metafictional interpolations - perhaps some revelation that the narrator is, for instance, a relative of both protagonists, perhaps performing some kind of review of their lives. But that hope is dashed: the source of all the remarks is simply Vargas Llosa.

This could, of course, represent Vargas Llosa's wish to escape third-person narrative forms, his railing against convention, like Gauguin and Tristán, by adopting an overt role in this artifact, his novel. He may also regard these forays into both narratives as providing the bridge that they so palpably lack. Whatever the case, his intentions remain opaque, and the puzzlement never entirely vanishes. Then again, Vargas Llosa's writing has seldom gravitated toward steel-clad plots or fancy devices: his literature has always ventured to explore the untidy grit and sinew of human action - precisely the domain of this novel.

He takes another curious liberty by articulating his characters' mental goings-on. This toys even further with our suspension of disbelief, since these thoughts are being attributed to historical figures, not merely the author's figments. While probably supported by his research, their presentation as mental musings - rather than as correspondence, for instance, or as someone's say-so - suggests an omniscience that biographical works rightly avoid. Streams-of-consciousness belong in fiction but not in biography, so muddying this line calls on readers to decide yet again if it 'works,' or if something is being violated.

One or two chapters get weighed down by these soliloquies and the intruding narrator, although most are full of engrossing, well-spun incident. Story-telling should always attend to the question, ...and then what happened? This book does this, and well, shining brightest with historical narrative and fiction, Vargas Llosa's métier. His account of Flora's times in an Arequipan nunnery, and in 1850s London and Parisian slums, raise her story very near the level of the Gauguin plot line. La Mariscala, an intriguing Amazon-warrior in Peru's 19th century civil wars, is also vividly portrayed, and Vargas Llosa chisels a fine, stony portrait of Gauguin's sexless wife, the Nordic "Vikinga," whom he leaves with their young to run off to Polynesia after his primitivist ideals, including the young Polynesian girls he beds even during his gradual putrefaction to death by syphilis. Along with the development of the central characters, all of these are handled masterfully.

My reservations arise while recognizing Vargas Llosa as among our foremost living writers. This is not my favourite of his novels, but it has rich rewards. Among an array of options, no doubt he considered two thematically-linked novellas rather than one long, dual novel. By my reckoning, he chose wrong. I suggest that you check how far your reading agrees.

I rarely read novels more than once. There are some I have read several times, but the list might just run to double figures. I have read The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa twice, but not for the usual reasons. First time though I was so disappointed with the book that I thought I had to be mistaken. So I waited a few months and read it again. Second time through I enjoyed it much more but, on finishing it, I had many of the same reservations as I did first time round.

The Way To Paradise juxtaposes two stories which, in essence, deal with how people pursue ideals. It identifies the inevitable selfishness associated with a person's obsession to achieve, how pragmatism and compromise inevitably dictate daily routine, and how fate, unpredictable and unyielding, has the ultimate say on all of our endeavours.

The two stories of The Way To Paradise are related by family. One describes how the French painter, Paul Gaugin, left his job as a mildly successful stockbroker to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. A closet painter while he acted out the humdrum of nine to five to provide for his thoroughly and properly domesticated Danish wife and five children, Paul Gaugin drooled over canvases by impressionist painters such as Manet. The latter's nude depiction of Olympia played a significant role in crystallising Gaugin's ambitions. A provocative and highly erotic painting it is, for sure. What Gaugin did not know, it seems, was that the sitter shared the name of his grandmother's lesbian lover. It would add poignancy to the story if the painting's subject was actually the grandmother's lover, but the decades don't add up.

Flora Tristan, Paul Gaugin's grandma, was born into potential wealth. But she was illegitimate, her wealthy Peruvian father having sired her via a poor French mother. So she grew up in poverty. She marries. She hates sex, abhorring everything to do with the act, so the marriage to an impatient husband does not last. There is a child, but there is also violence, threats, public scenes and estrangement. Flora takes up the struggle for women's rights, workers' rights and socialism. She dresses as a man to research the experience of prostitutes. She travels from town to town giving presentations and speeches to guilds, assemblies of the poor and groups of women.

Both Paul Gaugin and Flora Tristan travel. The artist, of course, as we all know, went to live on various Pacific islands, where he painted most of the works that now make him famous. But at the time, the experience was far from idyllic. Having wanted to escape the constricting conventions and conservatism of France, he found it reincarnated in the officialdom that dealt with him, his poverty, and his illness, syphilis, which rendered him smelly, pussy and unsightly. On can only imagine what his grandmother would have thought of his processing of local women, whom he painted, infected, made pregnant and then deserted, sometimes in that order. The grandson was doing what the grandmother would have despised, derided. But then the women on the receiving end weren't Europeans, were they?

Flora travelled to Peru in an attempt to claim the inheritance of her birthright. In South America, with colonial heritage all around, she brushed shoulders with the rich, with a way of life she could only dream about in Europe. The experience galvanised her, created the resolution to seek change, a resolve that drove her through her remaining years, prompted her to write, to seek self-expression that might widen and convince her audience.

And so both grandmother and grandson pursue their own ideals, never consciously attaining them, of course, but the pursuit, like the life that bears it, is the point. The process is the end, the product merely existence.

In reviewing The Way To Paradise I find I have taken much more from the book than I thought. I had problems with the style in that its unidentified narrator constantly seemed to address Flora and Paul directly, referred to them as `you', almost implying that they were acquaintances. On reflection, that might be part of the book's point, in that celebrity renders those who possess it the friends of anyone. Both characters are thus part of our own common history. We already know them as Paul and Flora. In the case of Paul Gaugin, however, we meet a much lauded, selfish, self-obsessed, perhaps, painter whom everyone recognises. In Flora Tristan, Mario Vargas Llosa tells us, we have a member of the same family who ought to be known better than she is. In contrast with her grandson, however, her selflessness, her energy, her purity, paradoxically, identify her as a figure worthy of respect, worthy of history. The Way To Paradise was clearly worth its second read.

You probably already read some of the previous (great) reviews. I do agree with most of what was written so I will not be repeating that information. But I do give you a tip; buy, or borrow a book of Paul Gauguin's art, and read this novel watching the paintings. Then you will realize the great descriptions Mr. Llosa gives of the paintings and their meaning. It's Stunning.

As for the second person references, it isn't that anoying, although at the end they are a little too common; but somehow they give you a link with Flora and Paul, maybe an empathic link.

The characters are very well researched, realistic, with lots of flaws (like everyone) and hopes, past mistakes, glorious victories... but with one common goal - the search for paradise.

A book in the genre of "Agony and Ecstasy" and "Lust for Life", this part-fact and part-fiction story (or novel?) is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin and that of his grandmother Flora Tristan.

The book's chapters alternate between the lives of Gaugin and Tristan trying to draw a common thread between their seemingly uncommon lives.

Though Gauguin is obviously better known of the 2 characters, Llosa's novel does well to bring to light the life and work of his illustrious socialist grandmother who devoted her life to the upliftment of the women.

Each of the two central characters (adventurers in their own sense) are searching for paradise - the grandmother by trying to change the world and the grandson by escaping from his world. The question the reader is forced to ask is "Did both of them discover their respective paradises?"

An extremely fast and engrossing read though it took me three chapters to figure out the writers style of writing (referring to the characters in second person) and his oscillation between the events in the lives of the two protagonists. As always, I am sure the original untranslated version made a better read than the translated-into-English version.

Excellent book, following the narrative style of "La fiesta del Chivo" but with a totally different topic, Vargas Llosa beautifully describes the thoughts and lives of two completely different minds but equally strong personalities (must be in their blood, as they are related): the painter Gauguin and his feminist/socialist grandmother Flora Tristan. And, if you like art, I think that Vargas Llosa makes a wonderful job describing the thoughts that originate some of Gauguin's paintings... it is just sublime. Highly recommended.