The Way to Paradise.

by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. El paraiso en la otra esquina. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2003.

Reviewed by Barbara Mujica

Nearly blind and dying of syphilis, Paul Gauguin wanders near a school in the Marquesas where he hears children playing Paradise, a game he remembers from his childhood in Peru and France. Each child approaches the others and asks the way to paradise, only to be told it is somewhere else. The episode captures the essence of the entire novel, a double fictional biography of Paul Ganguin and his activist grandmother, Flora Tristan, two dreamers who share a utopian vision.

Tristan, the daughter of a French woman and a Peruvian man whose marriage is declared invalid because it is performed by a renegade priest, is not a particularly lovable character. Married at an early age to a man who abuses her and later rapes their daughter, Tristan escapes with her three children and makes her way to Peru, where she hopes to obtain a share of her deceased father's estate. Although her uncle receives her with great affection and generosity, he refuses to give her what she considers her rightful inheritance. A few inquiries with lawyers convince her that it is impossible to win a legal battle against such a powerful man.

More out of anger than idealism, it seems, Tristan turns against her family and their way of life. The incident makes her painfully aware of the social inequity that permeates Peruvian society. Although she has received little education and spells poorly, she writes a memoir, Peregrinations of a Pariah, exposing the situation. She is particularly appalled by the condition of Peruvian women, epitomized by the nun Gutierrez, a young girl forced to enter a convent against her wishes. In her view, Peruvian women are simply objects--adornments, slaves, wombs--with no free will, no voice in their own destiny.

Once back in France, Tristan becomes a social reformer, struggling to raise the consciousness of workers and women. She travels throughout France, meeting with diverse reformist groups and trying to form cells of resistance. She laments that in France women have no more independence than in Peru. Furthermore, working conditions are deplorable and the church sides with the moneyed classes. In England she observes the horrendous abuse of prostitutes, many of them still children. Since the failure of her marriage, Tristan forgoes sex until she meets Olympia, a wealthy married woman with whom she...