There is a time for each kind of book; for me it is time for travel books. I love to go around the street shops or my favourite libraries just to look around if a book which is in tune with my state of mind drops into my hands. When I encountered Mischiefs of the bad girl, I knew that I had found what I was unconsciously searching for.
Ricardito, who has just found and lost his first love of youth, didn’t know that that pretty false Peruvian girl would be the salt and pepper of all his life. At the beginning he sees his life-long dream fulfilled: to live in Paris working as an UNO translator until the bad girl crosses time and again his path. Sometimes in London where she is married with a rich landlord, in Japan where she has troubles with the Yakuza; or in Madrid, where Ricardo finally decides to set his bones at rest and where he gets married but is not really happy because he will never be able to drop out the bad girl from his life.
Some moments you feel identified with the main character, sometimes you hate him with all your heart because of his “toxic” dependency on the bad girl. Every time she makes his life impossible you think there is no man able to stand the mischiefs of the bad girl, but he falls deeper and deeper in love.
There’s also room for some historical notes: parts of Peru’s history or the decade of the 70s in London with the birth of a new culture, drugs, music, hippies and freedom of love. Also, some good secondary characters, as some revolutionaries from Cuba searching for possible candidates for their campaign, a hippie who has taken refuge with a very classic old English woman or some of Ricardo’s work partners.
A good mix of reality and fiction, comedy and tragedy, love and hate, is used by Vargas Llosa to trap you in the pages of this book. This Peruvian author who has also written «The Green House», «Conversation in the Cathedral», «Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service» and «The Dumas Club» is considered one of the 20th century heavy-weight Latin American writers. He also became politically active during the 80s and ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and lost to Alberto Fujimori.
i’ve just finished reading it, really good book, my recommendations!