Summary
Mario Vargas Llosa: Praise to the Stepmother
A novel about the erotic-love triangle between Don Rigobert, a high-ranking official of the insurance company, his wife Lucrecia and Rigobert's young son Alfonso, in whom manhood began to awaken too early, and he falls in love with his stepmother, who has just turned forty. The basic narrative flow is interwoven with stories that don Rigoberto invents in bed, enriching his and Lucrezia's erotic life with images from his imagination. This novel represents an apology for carnal love, but also for the body as such, overcoming the split between spirit and body typical of Western civilization, and establishing harmony on the level of erotic as well as aesthetic pleasure, thereby opening the possibility for a glimpse of the true metaphysics of sensibility, which is raised to the level of the mystical, but also the only possible space of personal freedom. The work represents the first part of the whole, which is continued by "Don Rigobert's Notebooks".
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