Cold War Chronology in Vargas Llosa’s Travesuras de la niña mala

Abstract

ABSTRACT This romantic novel has been studied primarily in terms of the portrait of its female protagonist. Unmentioned by prior scholarly studies is the fact that throughout the novel, Vargas Llosa discreetly yet consistently dates plot developments, allowing the reader to deduce that the female protagonist dies in July 1989, the date of the author’s final experience of Europe during the Cold War. Drawing on this structure, the present article argues that the post-1989 historical events and social trends that appear in the text are not authorial chronological errors, but rather represent a deliberate effort on Vargas Llosa’s part to subsume the post-1989 world into the ethos of the Cold War years, when, as he argues in La civilización del espectáculo (2012), an essay collection written in part concurrently with Travesuras de la niña mala, books and ideas mattered more than is the case in the 1990s or the twenty-first century. In order to achieve this absorption of the post-Cold-War world by the pre-1989 period, this article maintains, Vargas Llosa depoliticizes the Cold War years, portraying them not in terms of East-West ideological struggle, but rather as an era of the flourishing of literary culture centred in Paris.