Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter · Radio serial
Pedro Camacho's Radio Serials
Pedro Camacho
A Bolivian scriptwriter's daily soaps — nuns, judges, disastrous love — which begin as separate worlds and then leak characters into one another as their author comes apart.
The Ankh-Morpork Times is a newspaper that happens to be invented. Camacho’s serials are invented newspapers that happen in the voice. Both are what this library said it would hold when it grew past books: broadcasts, scripts, the day’s episode, gone by tomorrow.
Vargas Llosa is cruel and accurate about the two kinds of writer in the house. The boy wants literature, Paris, a novel that will last. Camacho wants tomorrow’s instalment, and for a while he is a god of Lima’s afternoons. Then the worlds leak, which is Cortázar’s hopscotch performed as a nervous breakdown. The serials, printed as chapters of the novel you are holding, are the only editions. Radio does not keep them. That is why they belong here. A catalogue of bound volumes would have missed the escribidor entirely.
On the readability rating. Whole episodes, given as prose. The broadcasts are gone. Camacho’s scripts were never a book. They are now, which is the boy’s victory and not Camacho’s.
In-world history
Pedro Camacho arrives from Bolivia to save a Lima radio station, and for a time he does: a new script every day, several at once, a ferocious purity of cliché. Then the plots infect each other. A character from one serial appears in the next; ages slip; Camacho dresses as his own villains. The station replaces him. The narrator, who has been telling, in alternate chapters, the true story of marrying Julia Urquidi, goes to Europe to become a novelist. Camacho is the writer he is afraid of being, and the writer he is afraid of not being.
Why it matters
Vargas Llosa's non-book, as good as the *Times*: a serial that exists in the air, for an hour, and is gone. The young narrator wants to be a writer of books. Camacho is a writer of weather. Both are the novel.
Appearances
- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) — Mario Vargas Llosa La tía Julia y el escribidor; Camacho writes daily serials for Radio Panamericana in Lima, while the young Vargas Llosa marries his aunt
Connected volumes
- Related to The Ankh-Morpork Times · Discworld
- Related to Tales of the Black Freighter · Watchmen
- Related to If on a winter's night a traveler · The Fictions of Calvino
Catalogue record
- Category
- Radio serial
- World
- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
- Imagined by
- Mario Vargas Llosa
- First appearance
- La tía Julia y el escribidor (Seix Barral, 1977)
- Readability
- Extensive excerpts
Sources
- Mario Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el escribidor (Seix Barral, 1977). English translation by Helen R. Lane, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982).
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06