 "Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome." Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. In the carriage house, his great-grandfather s ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures. But Julius s father is dead, and his beautiful young mother passes through her children s lives like an ephemeral shooting star. Despite the soft shelter of family and money, hard realities overshadow Julius s expanding world, just as the rugged Andes loom over his home in Lima. This film -- based on a lyrical, richly textured novel, first published in 1970 as "Un Mundo para Julius" -- opens new Latin American territory with its focus on the social elite of Peru. The novel s author and a member of that elite, Alfredo Bryce Echenique incisively charts the decline of an influential centuries-old aristocratic family which becomes nouveau riche with the invasion of foreign capital in the 1950s. "A World for Julius" marks the first appearance of an important Peruvian writer whose Latin American postmodern fiction has won critical acclaim throughout the Spanish-speaking world.