Way to Paradise (Hardcover)

“The Way to Paradise” is a book firmly placed in this category and forced me to check what was reality and what was fiction. I found that, on Flora Tristán’s side at least, all names quoted were real people and all events did take place at the time when they were supposed to. As for Gauguin, all paintings were correctly attributed, even the Copenhagen addresses of his wife and parents-in-law (Frederiksbergalle and Nørregade), where they resided for a short time, are real ones.

Arnold Ruge (1802-1880) did indeed publish Marx’s first political treatise; Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) was a well known poet; Victor Considérant and Achilles François were (minor) historical figures. Zacharie Chabrié, naval officer who took her to Peru and later proposed to her, did exist. Mariano Llosa Benavides (almost certainly related to the author and an M.P. in 1827 when Constitutional issues were being discussed in Peru) who advised her not to pursue her uncle Don Pío on the question related to her illegitimacy, was certainly a real person. One gets the feeling that he may have been introduced in the narrative as a “teaser”, although he seems to be the person who finally convinced her to abandon her claims to legitimacy and eventually return to France to embark on her crusade. Perhaps this “teaser” is part of the “Magic Realism”.

Effectively, Flora was the predecessor of the suffragettes. She died in 1844 at the age of 41, four years before her grandson Paul Gauguin was born. It seems that the only thing that they had in common was a fiery temper. Madame-la-Colère, as she was sometimes called, deserves to be better known, and is a far more interesting figure than Gauguin. It is difficult to see why the two characters should be considered side-by-side and in that respect I found the book to be somewhat weak.

Not surprisingly, the passages dealing with Flora’s stay in Arequipa, also the author’s hometown, are perhaps the most convincing. She was a remarkable woman, especially when put in the context of her time and she achieved a great deal in a few short years. She had five children and a mad husband who raped their daughter Aline (Gauguin’s mother) and eventually fired a pistol at her in rue du Bac, lodging a bullet in her shoulder.

On Gauguin’s side, things are less clear, but that may well be due to the fact that his friends in Tahiti and the Marquesas were not persons of historical importance with the possible exception of the pastor, Paul-Louis Vernier, who is indeed a real person.

Allusion is made to a brief affair with the wife of his best friend, Louise Schuffenecker, and it is thought that this event took place during a visit that the couple made to Tahiti. At that time Gauguin was suffering from the venereal disease that he had caught in Panama and that was to kill him some years later. Louise ended up by committing suicide. Whether there is a connection between these two events is not known.

Of course, the abundance of historical facts makes the fantasy aspect that much more credible. This consists in what the two characters, Flora Tristán and Paul Gauguin, thought to themselves, the conversations that they had with other (but real) people, the juxtaposition of their lives, their motivations and so on.

Mario Vargas Llosa uses a technique of flashback and other literary devices that can be confusing and are sometimes irritating. But the most irritating feature is the frequent occurrence of what seem to be typographical errors. Valparaíso is written Valpara’so; Pío is written P’o, Hôtel H^tel; Lemaître Lema^tre, etc. I can only think that this is poor proof reading that will be corrected in subsequent editions. At least I hope so.

I got more than I expected. The book is actually a novel based on the lives of two people, Flora Tristan, Gauguin's grandmother, as well as Gauguin. Each is told from the perspective of their final years, with flashback reflections. Chapters alternate looking at the two lives. At first, that seemed like a distraction. But later, the artistic design became clearer. Flora Tristan would not have approved of her grandson, and he comes across even less sympathetically than I expected in the context of his family heritage. Although I picked up details about Gauguin that I wanted to learn about the context for his final works, I learned a lot about a remarkable woman about whom I would like to learn more, his grandmother.

Flora Tristan's life epitomizes the evils of the legal system and popular attitudes towards women in those waning decades before women began to earn equal rights. Because her parents' marriage was not a legal one, she could not inherit her father's wealth. Her husband was a brute who was not legally restrained after he committed many wrongs against her and her children . . . but only after he shot her. So she led much of her adult life like Jean Valjean, on the run from the laws which would have returned her and her children to the abuser. In the process, she developed a remarkable sensitivity to the downtrodden, including other women, slaves and industrial workers. She often dressed as a man to go places where women were not allowed or to pursue her goals of social reform. During a visit to England, she was encouraged by the Chartist movement to imagine a European-wide coalition of workers that would lead to reform. In pursuing her hopes for creating a better life on earth, she spent her final months while very ill recruiting workers for her union despite official resistance to her proselytizing. In one remarkable sequence, she traveled alone to Peru from France in hopes of gaining some of her father's estate.

The book focuses on Gauguin's life from the time he first set out for Tahiti. You find out more about his interest in the native customs and his relationships with the people there than about his art. The story focuses on his physical and mental deterioration as syphilis ravaged his body. Despite warnings that he was infectious, he sought sexual gratification from a series of young women (and any other woman who would make herself available). He comes across as the worst sort of abuser, the sort his grandmother would have hated. His vision was of a primitive past that was more fundamental and pure than the present, to be found in expired Maori practices that he cannot contact.

The contrast between the two lives is very powerful beginning around the middle of the book. Until then, I was often puzzled by why the book developed that way.

I found two things to be unpleasant about reading the book. First, the author assumed that I knew a lot more about Gauguin's life than I did. So many of the early details were only revealed in flashbacks near the end of the book. They would have been much more interesting and relevant if portrayed much earlier. The flashbacks themselves were put in as extended ruminations about the past. As such, these flashbacks didn't work well in some cases. They made both characters seem overly introspective. Gauguin, in particular, struck me as someone who was probably not very introspective at all.

Second, there is a lot of editorializing that comes in like an awkward third character. In most cases, the editorializing seems to add nothing to thoughts I had already had . . . such as how a married man acquired syphilis. I suspect that it would have worked better to have either skipped writing these sections or to have them develop as part of dialogue with another character. Here's an example: "The game of Paradise! You had yet to find that slippery place, Koki. Did it exist? Was it an illusion, a mirage?"

The immense number of details about daily life of the two main characters is impressive. With those details, you feel closer to the characters than you could have imagined considering that they led much different lives than most of us do now.

I was pleased to find that the book described the circumstances around the creation of many of the art works that I was most interested in. Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to have the background in art to fully engage in describing the artistic processes that Gauguin used. Such a focus would have made the book much more appealing to me.

So, despite my reservations, I do encourage you to read the book.

When you finish, think about where you see the potential for paradise.

In others of his books, MVL has played brilliantly with the conceit of the author/ narrator having a personality and being, essentially, an unseen protagonist in the novel - see Historia de Mayta for example. In The Way to Paradise, MVL uses a variation on this narrative device that I found very irritating, one where the narrator occasionally steps in to give unnecessary advice to the characters or to ask obvious rhetorical questions (usually in parentheses) of them. It's intrusive and condescending to the reader (as if MVL realises the reader's attention is wandering and that we need to be re-focused in the right direction).

If our attention is wandering, it's probably because of MVL's tendency to play around with sequences of events, so that cause and effect become entangled. MVL is a dazzling technician and storyteller, and on his day and in other books has used this device to great effect, but in The Way to Paradise it's merely confusing.

Finally, I also wonder whether this edition has been badly or hurriedly translated - usually MVL's books crackle along with great vivacity and energy, in English and in Spanish, and this one is very different.

All in all, a bit of a let down. If you're new to MVL, try Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, or The War of the End of the World, or The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, which are all amazing reads.