The Way to Paradise - Hardcover

The Way to Paradise weaves an extraordinarily rich double fantasia around Gauguin's life, strenuously explores qualities in the works, and sets moral issues in a far wider, more real historical world ... riveting stuff, beautifully written, wild, exact, and visually stunning. (Ruth Padel Independent)

The visionary painter of paradise [Gauguin] emerges as a misunderstood genius of the kind it takes a genius like Mario Vargas Llosa to understand. (Guardian)

Vargas Llosa's storytelling gifts are pretty much unrivalled ... His recreation of the tactile, sensuous, brilliant, whiffy details of the everyday is superb ... a fabulously abundant book. (Katherine Sale Financial Times)

What makes the novel so illuminating is the continuity between [the] parallel lives ... The novel is highly accomplished and teems with characters, ideas and incident. (Sebastian Shakespeare Literary Review)

Oddly affecting ... an engrossing, sometimes horrifying image of social conditions in France [from] one of the great Latin American novelists of his time. (The New York Times Book Review)

Fascinating ... vivid ... it's in [Gauguin's] part of the story, so full of the contradictions of this yearning, difficult man, that Vargas Llosa makes the book come alive. (Time)

Through his characters Vargas Llosa [captures] much of the liberationist spirit of the nineteenth century, the great romantic desire to escape the cramping bonds of tradition, whatever the cost. (Washington Post)