And now for something entirely different from Latin America: a comic novel that is genuinely funny. This screwball fantasy ["Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter"]—interwoven with a realistic tale of an improbable romance—is the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's homage to two people who gave shape to his artistic and personal life during his adolescence: an ascetic Bolivian who all day, every day, wrote scripts for radio soap operas, and the author's Aunt Julia.

The two become marvelous fictional creations in a novel that was originally conceived as half-autobiographical, and elements of autobiography still cling to it. The narrator is a young man named Mario, sometimes called Varguitas, which is a diminutive of the author's surname. The narrator precociously courts and marries his delectable Aunt Julia, as did Vargas Llosa, whose first wife was an aunt (but not a blood relative) named Julia. This book is dedicated...