Mario Vargas Llosa, The Way to Paradise

If you don’t like the society you live in, you can either try to change it or leave. In 1891, the painter Paul Gauguin left, fleeing bourgeois France for an existence filled with art and unashamed sensuality in Tahiti. In 1844, his grandmother Florita had embarked on a lifelong career of ardent political activism for workers’ rights and female equality. Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian grandmaster of letters, alternates chapter by chapter between these two divergent yet resonating lives, which somehow shared a common goal—building heaven here on Earth—if not much else. It’s a compelling pair of character studies, and we can’t help imagining that there’s a glimpse into what makes Vargas Llosa himself tick. His own attempts to combine careers as a civic leader and an artist have been disappointments at best; a failed 1989 campaign for the Peruvian presidency made him angrily declare that “literature and politics are mutually exclusive.” Sadly, he may be right.