Predator or prey?

Boy meets girl. Girl disappears. Boy meets the same girl again and again through all the remaining years of their lives as he restlessly travels the world. Though such a story is easily capable of dragging the reader into a long sentimental swim in a sea of bathos, Mario Vargas Llosa has created a compelling, hypnotic update of Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education” in his new novel, “The Bad Girl.” Through his narrator, a translator named Ricardo Somocurcio, the Peruvian novelist has opened a window onto the 20th century much as Flaubert did for mid-19th century France.

“Later on, I imagine,” Ricardo says early, “they forget about Lily and Lucy, because other people, other matters eventually replaced that adventure of the last summer of our childhood. But I didn’t. I didn’t forget them, especially not Lily.” He remembers the summer that he, at 15, met Lily and her sister. Lily speaks in double meanings, “telling jokes so risque they made the girls in the neighborhood blush.” She’s also a liar, passing herself off as a recent arrival from Chile, an exotic sophisticate in very provincial and parochial Lima in 1950. And yet a kiss and what he discovers about her deceptions are enough to mesmerize him -- and us as well -- as the story moves around the world and through the years.

Politics has always been prominent in Vargas Llosa’s novels, but “The Bad Girl” is first and foremost a love story. Most people, I think, can understand Ricardo’s situation; I have only to say the name Melinda and I take Ricardo’s place, much as what happens when I read about “Sentimental Education’s” Frederic and his hopeless attachment to Madame Arnoux. I don’t know whether this is an exclusively male thing; as I started to read “The Bad Girl,” all suspension of disbelief happened as soon as I understood Ricardo’s dilemma.

Ricardo establishes himself as a translator in Paris, and it is there that he -- and readers -- encounter Lily again: She has gone there, on the way to Cuba, to be trained as a guerrilla fighter. In Cuba, she transforms herself into Comrade Arlette, has an affair with a leading commandante of the Cuban revolution and returns to Paris as the wife of a high official in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Vargas Llosa carefully delineates the allure of the Cuban revolution and the ultimate futility of the murderous rebellions it tried to foment in South America, but he always grounds the novel in the sexual and manic encounters between Ricardo and Lily:

“ ‘The idea of spending the night with me makes you the happiest man in the world, Miraflores boy? I’m asking so you can tell me one of those cheap sentimental things you love saying so much.’

“ ‘Nothing could make me happier,’ I said pressing my lips to hers. ‘I’ve been dreaming about it for years, guerrilla fighter.’

“ ‘How many times will you make love to me?’ she continued in the same mocking tone.

“ ‘As many as I can, bad girl. Ten, if my body holds out.’

“ ‘I’ll allow you only two,’ she said, biting my ear.”

There is a knowing mockery of the conventions of love-chat here, and also a complex emotional truth that is hard to miss. Having discarded her French husband, Lily appears in England married to a fabulously rich horseman. Vargas Llosa deftly shows London as a city displacing Paris as the city of styles and trends in the 1960s. Later, Lily departs for Japan, where she lives a degraded life as one of the many mistresses of a Japanese drug-smuggling gangster. Here the novel grows darker and more disturbing: the grim humiliation Ricardo feels and the sexual perversions that Lily is forced to endure and participate in are simply shocking -- and not material even by allusion for a family newspaper.

Though Ricardo’s Lily is much like Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura, neither poet is ever mentioned by Ricardo: Only very late in life does he become interested in real literature after spending his career as a translator for UNESCO and other agencies. Literature is far removed from his life as a simultaneous translator, a job which a colleague bitterly reduces in this way: “What trace of our passage through this dog’s life of drudgery will we leave behind? . . . None, we haven’t done anything except speak for other people.”

“The Bad Girl” ends with a conversation between Ricardo and Lily -- it suggests what happens beyond the book’s last page:

“One afternoon, when we were sitting in the garden at twilight, she said that if it ever occurred to me to write our love story, I shouldn’t make her look too bad, because then her ghost would come and pull on my feet every night.

“ ‘And what made you think of that?’

“ ‘Because you always wanted to be a writer and didn’t have the courage. Now that you’ll be all alone you can make good use of the time and you won’t use me so much. At least admit I’ve given you the subject for a novel. Haven’t I, good boy?’ ”

“The Bad Girl” is a compelling mixture of the public and the private, and yet, it doesn’t seem like a great mountain to which readers will return often -- as one does, say, with Cortazar’s “Hopscotch,” Lezama Lima’s “Paradiso” or Onetti’s “A Brief Life.” Vargas Llosa’s treatment of these characters’ lives has such a perfect, cold clarity that one reading is enough.