SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “An Erotic Trip That Traverses Too-Familiar Territory.” Los Angeles Times (20 May 1998): E6.

In the following review, Eder asserts that The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto offers “stylish turns of phrase but little other excitement,” claiming that the novel is merely “Rigoberto, or perhaps Vargas Llosa, taking his thoughts for a walk.”

Mario Vargas Llosa seemed to depart from his fictions of Latin American darkness when he wrote In Praise of the Stepmother a few years ago. It is the elegant and highly erotic tale of Don Rigoberto: timid and proper in public and lush keeper of a pleasure garden in the harem-like privacy of his Lima home.

Certainly Don Rigoberto's comic sexual rituals with his second wife, Lucrecia, and her artful seduction by Fonchito, Rigoberto's 12-year-old son—as the bough is bent, so bends the twig—are delicate irony and insidiously pleasurable. Yet the “seemed” is...