Books
November, 1990
Mario vargas llosa's tenth novel, In Praise of the Stepmother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is literary art of a high order. Written in a richly sensuous vocabulary, this novel flows from idea to idea with ingenious, evocative phrases that stir the imagination and the intellect. His subject here is the erotic content of paintings by Fra Angelico, Titian, Francois Boucher and others (six paintings are reproduced in full color within the pages of this novel). Symbolically and philosophically, Vargas...
