Sex has always been a stumbling block for Utopian-minded social reformers. They are attracted to the ideal prospect of ‘free love’ but tripped up by a tendency, seemingly inherent, for men to exploit women if their sexual drive is not held in check by so-called ‘bourgeois’ customs.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s elegant and involving new novel is structured thematically around just such a dialectic. Its subject is the contrasting Utopian aspirations of two vivid historical figures who happened to have been related: Paul Gauguin and his grandmother Flora Tristán.

Gauguin most of us know something about (although many may not be aware that 2003 marks the 100th anniversary of his miserable death in the Marquesas Islands). Tristán, the mother of Gauguin’s mother, was an author and charismatic campaigner for the rights of workers and women. Both also have a connection to the author’s native Peru: Tristán went there to claim an inheritance from a rich uncle in Arequipa (Llosa’s home town) while Gauguin was born there.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP