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A head-spinningly egocentric novel but young Marito has so much puckish charm and zest for life it’s impossible not to take a shine to him. Similar to Augie March in that respect. The romance with Aunt Julia is young love at its best and the chaotic energy of the radio serials boils over spectacularly. There’s only really one character here but you have to admire the sheer exuberance of it all. This is the kind of maximalist lit I can’t not dig. Did I groan at the all-pervasive chauvinism? Yes. Did I find the anti-Argentine running gag hilarious? Also yes. ( )

Depois de ler "As travessuras da menina má", que adorei, peguei neste livro com bastante entusiasmo. Não foi o que esperava, mas não foi mau.
A história do escrevedor Pedro Camacho é muito mais original do que alguma vez poderia imaginar. Esta personagem vai certamente ficar na memória. E os contos - ao mesmo tempo tristes, bizarros e cómicos - são o grande destaque deste livro.
A história de amor com a tia Júlia, no entanto, deixou algo a desejar. Desenvolveu-se lentamente, para culminar num final abrupto, com pouca paixão à mistura. ( )

A monumental bore. I had high hopes when I found this book. Author unknown to me so my first take was that this book would be a total score, it sounded like it would be great read. It is certainly a unique story, but I found it wholly uninteresting... and it just dragged on forever. There was the occasional flowery prose, and there was even a sentence or two reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it wasn’t a bad novel per se but I quickly found myself wanting ALL the characters to perish in some unspeakable manner like in the later Pedro Camacho serials. ( )

I had a hard time getting into this book, mainly because I was much more interested in the weird soap opera stories interspersed than the tribulations of the main character, a stand in for Vargas Llosa himself. He takes the true-to-life romance between himself and his aunt-by-marriage, and wraps it around the story of an obsessive radio soap opera writer, and both the writer and the progressively more confusing soap opera stories are the heart of this novel about storytelling. Ultimately, however, I enjoyed it. ( )