The dramatic story of the great post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, and his grandmother Flora Tristan, trail-blazing women's suffragist.
Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. Paul a struggling painter, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.
Vargas Llosa makes stunning art of their unlikely lives, chronically their obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of adventure, illness and death.
