Journal Article

FROM THE VOR VAULT: AT HOME

2016

Overview

Lawrence Raab, from \"Permanence,\" Summer 1999 In the early years of the 1950s there were still no tall buildings in Miraflores, a neighborhood of one-story houses-two stories at the most-and gardens with their inevitable geraniums, poincianas, laurels, bougainvilleas, and lawns and verandas along which honeysuckle or ivy climbed, with rocking chairs where neighbors waited for nightfall, gossiping or inhaling the scent of the jasmine. In some parks there were ceibo trees thorny with red and pink flowers, and the straight, clean sidewalks were lined with frangipani, jacaranda, and mulberry trees, a note of color along with the flowers in the gardens and the little yellow D'Onofrio ice-cream trucks-the drivers dressed in their uniforms of white smocks and little black caps-that drove up and down the streets day and night, announcing their presence with a Klaxon whose slow ululation had the effect on me of a primitive horn, a prehistoric reminiscence. Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman, \"The Chilean Girls,\" Summer 2007 It wasn't simply that the white stucco walls had a fortress-like thickness or that we were accommodated with pets and bicycles and a Ping-Pong table on the back veranda.

• Publisher: Virginia Quarterly Review
• Subject: Gray, J Glenn / Vargas Llosa, Mario (1936-2025)