I just finished Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'. It was a rambling piece of work. A novel which had a innovative narrative technique with eclectic array of soap opera like short stories without a clear end. The main story which is a sort of semi autobiographical is about the love affair between Mario with his 'distant' Aunt (Julia) who is 14 years older to him. There is no second distinct story rather we find dozens of different soap opera style fascinating stories. These amusing stories are manufactured by a cranky somewhat brilliant scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho. This Bolivian scriptwriter's piquant radio plays is the unique part of the novel . The novel alternates between Mario's real life narrative and Camacho's soap opera plays. Camacho's intriguing different short stories are quite fascinating like a superb soap opera but at the end of the novel the stories get jumbled up and intertwined in the most absurd ways and in most cases leading to the sudden annihilation of many characters due to some natural catastrophe.
The sharp funny moments that dominate the narrative makes the novel quite a real fun to read. This would be one of the most funniest fascinating novels that I have read. The others like this which would come to my mind are Kundera's ' TheLast Waltz' ;V S Naipaul's 'The House of Mr. Biswas' and definitely Marquez's 'Hundred Years of Solitude' and also Rushdie's 'Midnights Children'. In terms of humour I think it stands among these masterpieces.
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