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 mean writer, spoke of her at second hand as “quite a woman,” and “a socialist bluestocking … who gave everything for the workers’ cause.” Apart from the blood tie, their only physical point of contact was the town of Arequipa, Vargas Llosa’s birthplace. Thither in 1833 Flora boldly travelled from France, a woman alone, in a vain quest to recover her Peruvian inheritance; and there Paul lived with his widowed mother until he was six, an experience he could still recall in detail many years later.

Their true point of contact lay in the world of dreams, different as these were, translated into action. For Flora it was the emancipation of women and workers united in mutual help in order to build an ideal world of social justice—a peaceful revolution for which she sacrificed her own life as well as that of her children. For Paul it was the conviction that an innocent world untainted by corrupt civilization lay somewhere else, far off, over the horizon, in Martinique, in Tahiti, in the Marquesas, and that to live in this primitive, “savage” world was essential for the creation of a new kind of art. In pursuit of that dream he left his Danish wife and five children. The image of the novel’s title—paradise around the corner—is taken from a children’s game, a variety of blind man’s buff, and there is something puerile as well as heroic in such utopian undertakings as those of Flora and her grandson.

The whole rich and subtle novel is rooted in the novelist’s ambivalence toward the quest for utopia. Of Flora the political activist he writes that if things did not turn out well for her it was not for lack of effort, heroism, and idealism, but because in this life things never turn out as well as they do in dreams. It is a theme that he had already adumbrated in his fine novel Historia de Mayta, where a political idealist moves from moral indignation, revolt, dreams, “mystic generosity” to abortive revolutionary action. Yet while Vargas Llosa is a (disillusioned) admirer of Sartre and a onetime leftist sympathizer turned liberal-minded democrat and sensible pragmatist, he is also an artist with a debt to surrealism—and especially its humorous side—who feels that a life without dreams is a poor thing and that in art dreams are boundless and all embracing. There is no way of reconciling these opposites, the political and the aesthetic, except through his art.

The structure of his new novel takes the form of a kind of dual biography. It is based on careful research, like all Vargas Llosa’s mature masterpieces: La guerra del fin del mundo, on the millenarian revolt in the back lands of Brazil toward the end of the nineteenth century, a book which transcends even its famous main source, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertoes, and the gut-wrenching La Fiesta del Chivo, which explores in fine detail the monstrous reign of the cruel Dominican dictator Trujillo and its lingering cost in damaged lives. His latest work of fiction concentrates upon Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin as they move toward their end, with their flashbacks of memory that evoke the relationships, episodes, ideas, and feelings of earlier years. The protagonists are also linked by an omniscient narrator who occasionally addresses them with sympathetic familiarity as “Florita” and “Koke” (the Tahitian approximation of the name Gauguin), a formula that, although disconcerting, allows the author to encompass queries in a way denied to the biographer proper. The double story is told in chapters alternately devoted to Flora and Paul. This resembles the method Vargas Llosa adopted in his memoirs El pez en el agua, where a chapter of autobiography is followed by one that gives an account of his campaign to become president of Peru in 1990, his growth as a writer being balanced by his political adventure. In his novel, Flora’s single-minded concern with socio-political action is balanced by Paul’s single-minded concern with art.

Neither Flora nor Paul appears as a particularly attractive character and, as he probes them from within, the author does not attempt to spare their weaknesses. They are both ruthless and obsessive egoists, troubling figures of a variety that has always appealed to his imagination. On her adventurous voyage to Peru, Flora passes herself off as single, though she has a husband and children living in France, and she toys with the affections of the ship’s captain who wishes to marry her. She uses him, as Paul uses the beautiful thirteen-year-old girls who figure in his paintings and whom he takes to his bed in the islands while he is being painfully destroyed by syphilis. On the one hand, there is Flora’s near frigidity through the sufferings caused by a brutal husband, with a lesbian episode (amply documented); on the other, Paul’s drive to sexual exploration including an erotic fascination with the mahu, the Polynesian hermaphrodite, tenderly portrayed.

It is only relatively recently, with the rise of modern feminism, that Flora Tristan has been recognized as an important literary and political figure. Offspring of an irregular union between a Frenchwoman and Don Mariano Tristán, scion of a powerful Peruvian family and friend of Bolívar, Flora as a child moved suddenly from ample comfort to near penury on her father’s early death. Marriage at seventeen to her employer, André Chazal, proved a disaster. She fled the marital home and dared to fight him through the courts. Chazal shot her in the street and the bullet lodged permanently near her heart.

Virtually self-educated, she wrote several books in addition to the account of her Peruvian experiences that made her name. Life in Peru fostered not only her loathing of privilege, injustice, and bigotry but also her admiration for female empowerment embodied in ex-President Gamarra’s wife, a forceful woman of action she encountered. Flora Tristan’s works included a novel, Méphis, and more notably Promenades dans Londres (1840), an exposé of the appalling condition of prostitutes and the laboring poor she had witnessed when employed as a ladies’ companion in the capital. Influenced by utopian socialists, Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, nonetheless she followed her own path. She travelled around France, although she was desperately ill, trying to win support for the ideas she expounded in L’Union ouvrière. Most of the intelligent women writers of the day believed that the cause of women would be promoted through the advent of socialism—sad error—but Flora was unique in taking her ideals into the cities, knocking her head against the wall of incomprehension and opposition. Vargas Llosa follows her to her early death in Bordeaux with admiration tinged with a certain exasperation that she often inspires.

The novelist brings Flora to life by a remarkable imaginative leap, but his love of painting leads him as an artist to empathize even more closely with Gauguin. Once Paul has discovered his destiny in art he abandons bourgeois domesticity and life as a stockbroker to venture into the unknown. Vargas Llosa had touched on this theme in El hablador where the middle-class half-Jew Saúl Zuratas mysteriously disappears into the Amazonian jungle to live with the primitive Machiguenga Indians as their “storyteller.” By the time Gauguin reached Polynesia, however, so had civilization, and he was hard pressed to find any trace of native belief in ancient Maori gods and the cannibalism and savagery he was seeking. It is the painter’s feverish urge to paint that imposes itself. He knows when he has produced a work of true mastery. He wants recognition yet does not care about opinion. Nothing can stand in his way to creative fulfilment—not indifference, rejection, isolation, terrible physical suffering, a lonely death. As with his grandmother, so with Gauguin: it is courage that dominates Vargas Llosa’s brilliant novel—a tour de force that by some magisterial sleight-of-hand combines pain and frustrated idealism with the touching humanity that characterizes his writings.