The belief that the craft of narrative fiction is alive, well, and putting on flesh in South America seemed for many pages verified by Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, originally published in Peru in 1977. Not only is Llosa immediately acceptable as a proper storyteller: his stories are set in, to us, exotic Lima, and they are clearly going to be fashionably fickle and freckled, peppering the promising narration by 18-year-old Mario of the mutual love that unfolds between him and his 32-year-old aunt-by-marriage Julia, a divorcée from Bolivia….

Well presented, then, a good scene, and not only Mario's: interspersed are what seem to be poised to develop into nourishing subplots—the episode of the incestuously pregnant bride, of the Kaspar-Hauser of a naked nigger, doomed literally for the trash-heap, of the dubiously unchaste Jehovah's Witness—and so right is the pitch of the...