"The Bad Girl," a beautifully constructed, stinging tease of a novel

"The Bad Girl"

by Mario Vargas Llosa

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 276 pp., $25

Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian author who now lives in London, likes to write about characters suspended between conflicting realities.

In his novel "The Storyteller," he pitted the world of Lima academics against that of an isolated tribe in the Amazon. "In Praise of the Stepmother" veered between a sexually fraught middle-class household and the world of art (with plenty of backdoor connections between the two).

Now in "The Bad Girl," a beautifully constructed, stinging tease of a novel, his atlas of experience expands to include Europe, Japan, his native Peru ... and some sado-erotic realm of the psyche that defies easy naming.

"The Bad Girl" covers four decades in the lives of two hopelessly ill-matched yet incendiary lovers. The book is seductively cosmopolitan, yet has the springy rhythm of folktale, too, as its title character repeatedly intrudes on the life of its hapless hero with a ruthlessness that makes Delilah's treatment of Samson look demure.

Narrator Ricardo Somocurcio — a Peruvian translator-interpreter whose only goal for himself is to ditch Peru and spend his whole life in Paris (he succeeds) — is the willing victim of the bad girl (she does have a name — but it keeps on changing).

He loves her from the time they're in their teens, but she misleads him from the start. In the Peruvian beach town where he lives, she introduces herself as the daughter of Chilean exiles. But when she's presented with a real Chilean, it grows obvious she knows nothing about her supposed country of origin.

To Ricardo, this scarcely matters. Over the next few decades, his "Chilean girl" becomes "the guerrilla fighter, the bureaucrat's wife, the wife of a horse breeder, the gangster's mistress," on a course that takes her from Peru to Paris to Cuba to London to Tokyo. She wants more out of life than he can ever give her — and he'll put up with anything to have what little he can have of her. This "bad girl" and "good boy," as they call each other, are tied by a connection that threatens to destroy them both.

That may seem like a thin story line on which to spin a tale close to 300 pages long. But each chapter in Ricardo's life, in Edith Grossman's tart, fluent translation, is a small novel unto itself with its own amiable or striking protagonists, offering a whole fabric of reality waiting to be shredded to pieces by the reappearance of the bad girl.

In this way, Vargas Llosa lures us into the world of Latin American revolutionaries; the tony equestrian crowd of Norfolk, England; the denizens of sex clubs in Tokyo; and much more. While he's at it, he gives us a lively potted plot of Peru's political trajectory from the 1950s to the 1990s, along with 1960s excesses and later AIDS ravages (the latter treated affectingly but set implausibly early in the mid-1970s).

On another level, the novel contemplates the plight of the exile who becomes a foreigner no matter where he goes, detached from his surroundings, "existing but not existing." That's the case with both Ricardo and the bad girl, in their different ways. Exile, for the bad girl, leads to continual self-invention. But as one observer notes, living a lie makes her "feel more secure, less threatened than living in the truth."

Vargas Llosa, pulling back one illusory screen after another, eventually reveals the bad girl's true story in a manner that couldn't be more satisfying. And he's superb on the phases of misery and distrust Ricardo is willing to go through for a woman who uses and abuses him, yet who captures his imagination and even his sympathy.

"I want you to go on doing every mean thing in the world to me," he tells her at one point.

Not a good basis for a relationship, perhaps — but it makes for a hell of a novel.

He has been the Seattle

Times book critic since

1998 and has published

four novels.