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The Bad Girl

Smitten for life

Mario Vargas Llosa
Faber, pp. 276pp, ££16.99,

Simon Baker

Wednesday, 2nd January 2008

Ricardo Somocurcio, the narrator of The Bad Girl, is an unambitious man whose sole wish, ever since his childhood in Peru, has been to live in Paris. He studied hard at school and, on arriving in Paris after university, learns languages and soon makes enough money from working as a freelance interpreter to stay in his chosen home. He has a mild concern that he is simply drifting, but in fact his lack of aspirations is nothing worse than the result of being a balanced, civilised individual, happy if he has a reasonable income and enough time to enjoy reading and socialising.

However, Ricardo’s existence is never as quiet as it should be, thanks to the ‘bad girl’. She (we discover her name only towards the end) is a quirkily beautiful, dissembling, callous woman who enters Ricardo’s life when she appears in his town in her early teens, passing herself off as Chilean and well-to-do (she is neither: she is Peruvian and poor). The local girls are jealous of her wild dancing, but the teenaged Ricardo is smitten; he becomes her almost-boyfriend, hanging around with her but never receiving a true commitment.

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