Tale of Gaugin's final years in his Tahitian idyll

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THE WAY TO PARADISE

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 373 pages

REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE

By the time Paul Gaugin left Europe for good, journeying to Tahiti in the 1890s, he had had it with Western civilization. To him, Europe had become a miserable, decadent place, obsessed with materialism, corrupted by industrialism, empty of spirituality. He dreamed of a virgin landscape, a primitive place where art could be purified and renewed, a place inhabited -- to use the language of the Enlightenment philosophers -- by innocent and noble savages. He would be the anti-missionary; rather than imposing the West upon the Maoris of the South Pacific, he would learn their secrets and share their earthly paradise.

In 1890, Gaugin wrote a letter to the Danish painter J.F. Willumsen, expressing his hopes for a Tahitian Eden. "I want to forget," he wrote, "all the misfortunes of the past, I want to be free to paint without any glory whatsoever in the eyes of the others and I want to die there and to be forgotten there."

He never did find the idyllic world he was looking for. It didn't exist, of course. And though Gaugin painted several masterpieces while in Tahiti, including the allegorical "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?," he increasingly became an isolated figure. To make matters worse, many of his Maori neighbors thought of him as just another European. He may have declared, before leaving for Polynesia, that "the European Gaugin has ceased to exist," but when the Maoris gazed upon him, they failed to see the savage he so desperately wanted to be.