Don Rigoberto fills pages with notes, comments, and fantasies to protect himself from ordinariness. He also uses them to escape the longing he feels for Lucrecia, his wife, from whom he's separated as a result of something that transpired between her and his son. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is, in many ways, much more than mere erotic novel, it is a testament to reality and desire, a testimony of the myriad of ways imagination can compensate for the limitations imposed by real life. "The erotic is the dignification of sex through fantasy and culture," Vargas Llosa.