Here, fresh off the boat from Peru, is the exception to prove the rule that all autobiographical novels about growing up to be a writer are alike, noisy with the clacking of John-Boy's typewriter and the howl of the Wolfe. As far as the Andes are from Walton's Mountain is Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter from most efforts to shake literary pay dirt from the author's roots. The story, set in Lima in the fifties, traces the eighteen-year-old narrator's pristine secret courtship of his Aunt Julia, a sensuous but pragmatic Bolivian divorcée, and his simultaneous fascination with the squirrelly Pedro Camacho, a consummate artist-cum-one-man industry dedicated to the cranking out of radio serials. This is a curious yet seductive book that layers truth, in the guise of the author's own story, with fiction, in the form of Camacho's modern gothic soapers….

Underneath it all...