In Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2006 novel The Bad Girl, his character Ricardo Somocurcio says repeatedly that he wants to live in Paris and go on living there because ‘in Paris, living was living, France was the country of culture’. ‘That’s what I want: to live here. Does it seem like a small thing to you … My only ambition is to go on living here, just as I’m doing now,’ Ricardo says throughout this little novel of constancy in love. Ricardo did not want to be a writer or a musician, an actor or even a revolutionary, he wanted to be swallowed up in the culture of Paris for all of his life.

He could not have said, though, what this culture was, exactly, or where it might be found at its best. Ricardo’s ideas about culture were either so superficial that we, the readers, see him as no more than a cliché, or his ideas were so profound they resisted the superficiality of intellectual analysis. The novel, cleverly enough, does not lead us to define the culture that Paris represents or finally come to a judgement about Ricardo’s devotion to it.