Kindred Spirits

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Gauguin is more to us than a great painter. He's our ultimate escape artist; the stockbroker who hightailed it to the breadfruit and warm surf and nipples of the South Seas, where his palette and his libido flourished, the man who said no to civilization and really meant it.

As it turns out, refusal ran in his family. Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was a spiritual fugitive of another kind, a pre-Marxist socialist visionary who traveled across provincial France in the 1840s, preaching a gospel of class justice and the liberation of women. In The Way to Paradise (Faber and Faber; 320 pages) Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, onetime presidential hopeful and perennial Nobel candidate, lightly fictionalizes their stories in alternating chapters, portraits of two literally kindred souls in revolt against the horsewhips and hypocrisy of the bourgeois order. Both of them rejected the world as they found it — repressed, greedy, deaf to the higher (or lower) impulses. Each of them died with hands still stretched toward the horizon.

A whiff of the lecture hall is detectable all through this book. (Some passages have more dates than an almanac.) But the juxtaposition of Tristan's and Gauguin's stories is fascinating all the same. In their different ways, both were moralists and proselytizers. Gauguin saw his paintings as pamphlets. His sensual Tahitians and Maori gods, his untamed yellows and greens were ripostes to the attenuated spiritual powers of Europe. His grandmother, meanwhile, was eventually compelled to admit the importance of sex for human happiness, despite her attachment to higher goals. And both were constantly embroiled in fights with the police, clergy and courts.

In the chapters devoted to Tristan, who died four years before her grandson was born, Vargas Llosa reimagines 1844, the year of her death from typhoid at the age of 41. Tristan spends most of it traveling around southern France, pleading her vision of a cooperative future to small, mostly uncomprehending audiences. Years earlier she had fled her abusive husband, taking their small daughter Aline, Gauguin's mother. Tristan thinks back on the odyssey that then took her as far as Peru, where she went in hope of securing an inheritance from her late Peruvian father. The money was denied her, but Tristan was dauntless, the sort of woman who would later dress as a man to investigate conditions in London slums and sponsor a contest for composers to write a new anthem for the working class.

For Gauguin the road to salvation is through the senses, and it takes him far from weary Europe. It's in his part of the story, so full of the contradictions of this yearning, difficult man, that Vargas Llosa makes the book come alive. Gauguin arrives in a paradise that is already lost to the corruptions imported by French colonial administrators and missionaries. In search of a truly unspoiled culture, he eventually sets off for the even more isolated Marquesas with his paintings and collection of pornographic postcards. Two years later he dies there, blind and covered with syphilitic sores but leaving behind paintings that changed the course of Western art. No one discovers paradise in this novel. But Gauguin leaves a bit of heaven in his wake.