Do you believe in endless, unconditional love? The answer to this question is likely to shape one’s opinion of The Bad Girl.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian Nobel Prize winner in literature. His most famous books include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and the War of the End of the World. He is an exciting multi-talent, moving between journalism, writing, politics and lecturing. These multiple roles are also reflected in his writing, which give intelligent and real accounts of society and current affairs.

The Bad Girl extends over decades, covering the lifetime of Ricardo Somocurcio. Starting in the 1950s, when fifteen year old Ricardo meets the love of his life, Lily, in Miraflores in Lima, Peru. However, Lily quickly disappears when it becomes evident that she has been lying about her nationality and background. In his twenties, Ricardo moves to Paris, where he works as an interpreter and translator. Again, he meets Lily, who this time goes under the name ‘Comrade Arlette’, a trainee revolutionary. Ricardo falls in love with her again, but once more she disappears following a short romance. She later remerges as the wife of a French diplomat, then as the wife of a rich horse trader in Newmarket, London, and later on as the wife of a Japanese businessman. She is constantly on the hunt for material improvement, and men are the tool she uses to get this. Ricardo, with his modest income from working as an interpreter and translator, is unable to win her over, but through his job, he manages to arrange to attend conferences where Lily currently lives. This way, their romance stretches over a number of different contexts and time periods.

It is a book for the hopelessly romantic, for those who believe that the concept of ‘the one’ is actually real, for those who dream of experiencing true and endless love. I remember when I first read this book, in my early 20s, single, and on my way to Uganda. Full of dreams and new impressions, this book managed to make a real impact in me, as I smiled, cried and loved with Ricardo. As soon as the book finished, I went straight to the first page and read the whole story over again.

For the rest, it might be too much. This is probably also why the book got a number of poor reviews when first published.

A review in the Guardian said it was full of cliches and unconvincing. There might be some truth to that; Lily is not a very charming character, with the exception of her beauty. She is overtly materialistic, sacrificing her body and her life to advance her social standing. It is difficult to understand what she wants in life, and probably she doesn’t even know that herself. Still, she is a character that makes the reader ask themselves important existential questions about the times we live in, and what constitutes happiness in our capitalistic societies.

Ricardo might also be a tough character to understand; a simple man, living an ordinary life, with the exception of his crazy love for Lily, which makes him sacrifice everything for her. Compared to Lily, he is happy where he is, having fulfilled his childhood dream of living in Paris and working with languages. The only thing missing is the love of his life. Again, some questions come to mind. What is a happy life, is it better to be happy with what you have and the small things in life, or should you pursue more, like Lily? In the end, he is the one who is rewarded, whilst her life goes downhill, but this can probably be interpreted in many different ways.

In the end, your reading experience is likely to depend on whether you believe such love exists, and with that, if you also find these characters and their emotions credible. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading not only for the love story, but also for Vargas Llosa’s depiction of life and society, in Peru and Europe, from the 1950s to the present.

Marcel Proust had always struck me as the quintessential snob’s choice; pretentious, devoid of action and inundating readers with impenetrable vocab. All of these concerns proved spot-on as I laboured my way through endless sentences disturbed by commas almost at every other word, sometimes lasting half a page long. Often I was too mentally exhausted to turn the page when I got to the bottom. The first chapter (at least) had made absolutely no sense to me. However, I had paid some £8.99 for the book and my Scrooge instincts told me I should get another few more pounds-worth from it at least, a decision that turned out to be worthwhile as Proust’s unique charm began to dawn on me – an ability to transfigure everyday observances into the most beautiful, inventive and moving descriptions. With a literary virtuoso’s touch he bends, twists and toys with words in such an intriguing way that I begrudgingly started recognising his genius, and I really do mean genius, when reading his description of a lantern. Those that have read The Way by Swanns might recall a child boy’s description of a rotating metal lantern early on in the book, which has the shapes of knights, castles and so forth cut out of it and filled with coloured glass, meaning their figures are projected in multicolour on his bedroom wall. I then grasped that, unlike all the incomprehensible drivel that had preceded it, I was suddenly following Proust’s train of thought to precision, and there I was, in the child’s bedroom, with a peculiar type of lantern I have never ever seen in person but could nonetheless perfectly visualise. For a few pages I really followed knights and maidens as they travelled across his room, their shapes distorting as they cross different surfaces. For me these lucid moments occurred intermittently, but I learned be patient when I was made to feel stupid by Proust’s complex language, thought process and tangential descriptions, as I would just as suddenly find myself back on his train of thought and be rushed away again, with no hard feelings about the abandonment in-between. I did get used to his style though, so the book got much easier as it progressed.

Really there was little in the way of plot to recommend the volume, particularly the first book of volume one. The second book in the volume breaks off almost entirely from the first, aside from some tenuous linkages that have no influence on the story. Disappointingly I felt that the second book of the volume was incredibly dull, and chose to follow a plot-theme redolent of your typical, though well written, 19^th Century novel – a love story centring on an all-consuming and destructive obsession between a rather silly, limp man and his manipulative, slightly evil muse. As all too often, it is set amongst the bored and boring in top-tier social circles, with the usual dollop of social politics mixed in. There was quite a lot of action-y stuff going on which surprised me, but in the process all of the unique, gentle and hyper-sensitive charm that characterises the first book was lost. Incidentally, with such a shallow concept it became very repetitive and offered little that I hadn’t read elsewhere.

What Proust was doing in the first book was discarding my preconceived ideas about what a book is for. It doesn’t need to be a story as such; a wizard like Proust can conjure and things far better from a fragmented bundle of recollections, set of descriptions or a medley of weird characters and with nothing really ever leading to anything. I have not yet attempted to read the other volumes of In Search of Lost Time, I haven’t the stamina, though I imagine the plots of the first and second books begin to intertwine. However, I finished the first book of volume one entirely satisfied that nothing had really happened at all.

If you wish to swim around in Marcel’s mind, then give the book a try. It’s no page turner, but you and your senses may just come away dazzled by the descriptive vividness.