In Peru in the 1950s, when he was a student, Mario Vargas
Llosa read Flora Tristan’s self-revealing Pérégrinations d’une
paria (1838), with its vivid and often scathing impressions of
Peruvian society, a book that left a deep mark on him. As he
told an interviewer from Le Figaro Littéraire in April 2003 who
came to question him about his latest work of fiction, El
Paraíso en la otra esquina, he may well have thought even then
about writing a novel inspired by her tempestuous life. In his
fascinating memoirs, El pez en el agua (1993), Vargas Llosa listed
among his future literary projects in 1987 a novel about the
half-French half-Peruvian socialist and feminist militant, who
died in mid-task in 1844 at the age of forty-one. So it looks as
if the subject of El Paraíso en la otra esquina has been
maturing virtually throughout his literary life. It was only
later, after beginning to write the novel about Flora Tristan,
that he thought of including in the work the destiny of her
equally extraordinary grandson, the painter Paul Gauguin.

Here was a literary project marked by the daring ambition that
has distinguished the mature work of Vargas Llosa, an outstanding
master of the narrative art. The year 2003 happens to be the
centenary of Flora Tristan’s birth in 1803 and Paul
Gauguin’s death in 1903. They never met: Flora died four years
before her grandson’s birth. In his Avant et Après, Gauguin,
who was no