Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima of the
author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news
department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two
arrivals. The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years
older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio
scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are
holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his
confidant as he slowly goes insane.