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the complete review - drama

The Young Lady from Tacna

by
Mario Vargas Llosa

general information | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : fine play of story-telling and memory

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

       The Young Lady from Tacna is a cleverly structured play that nicely evokes the past, while also dramatising the creative act.
       The stage has two sets. One is Belisario's study -- "anywhere in the world in 1980". Belisario is a writer, "between forty and fifty, or even older", struggling over a story. The rest of the stage is in his grandparents' house, in Lima in 1950, when Belisario was still studying to become a lawyer (or pretending to). The central figure there is Mamaé, an "old lady of about a hundred".
       Mamaé has "found the perfect means of escaping from this misery that surrounds us", as she is a doddering old woman by now, fantasizing about the past and lost in the present. Around this Belisario invents his story -- a mix of the fact and fiction of Mamaé's life story, built on her recollections and contrasted with the situation in the 1950s-present. She becomes young again on the stage, and relives an early romance and disappointment -- nicely managed by Vargas Llosa, with Belisario as a helpful onstage intermediary.
       The whole story of the family, which has fallen on ever-harder times, and Mamaé's place in it (she was taken in by Belisario's great-grandparents when she was orphaned at age five or six, and raised like their own daughter) is neatly described, as are Belisario's struggles to create. He eventually concludes:

A writer is someone who writes, not what he wants -- that's what the normal person does -- but what his demons want him to.

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Links:

• The complete review's Mario Vargas Llosa page
• Biography at books and writers
• Nobel Prize in Literature, 2010
• Mario Vargas Llosa site (Spanish)

• Fiction:
  • The Bad Girl
  • The Discreet Hero
  • The Feast of the Goat
  • In Praise of the Stepmother
  • The Neighborhood
  • The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
  • The Way to Paradise
  
  
• Non-fiction
  • A Fish in the Water
  • The Language of Passion
  • Letters to a Young Novelist
  • The Perpetual Orgy
  • The Temptation of the Impossible
  • Wellsprings
  • A Writer's Reality
  
  
• Drama:
  • Three Plays:
    • La Chunga
    • Kathie and the Hippopotamus
    • The Young Lady from Tacna

• See Index of Drama books
• See Index of Latin and South American literature
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He has written many works of fiction and non-fiction, and has run for the Presidency of Peru.

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