Some Sources and Further Reading
TRAVEL
The best modern travel book on Paraguay is without doubt At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig by John Gimlette (Arrow, £7.99). Published in 2003 and described as ‘a riotous journey into the heart of Paraguay’, it is, in fact, a serious and informative book disguised and marketed as a silly one. Gimlette has been visiting Paraguay since the 1970s and has read about and absorbed much of its history, as well as having excellent contacts in the country. At least half of his book is made up of a history of Paraguay and the region, and he manages to be as fair and neutral as one can be in such a minefield. He was able to move about in ‘the good old days’ when there was virtually no crime and no violence – apart from the secret services, of course. He starts his book with the fact that Asunción was gripped by a murder in the summer of 1982, then a rarity. On the Sunday I was attacked and mugged, there were five murders in Asunción alone, plus untold muggings – and that was a quiet day.
A curiosity from the depths of the stronato is Gordon Meyer’s The River and the People (Methuen, 1965). This is very good and atmospheric on the Chaco and the wildlife. Meyer is a curious character, highly intelligent but deeply enigmatic, and his perspective on Argentina and Paraguay is original and unusual. A long out-of-print but worthwhile oddity to track down.
FAUNA HUGGING
The wildlife fan could start with David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest in Paraguay (Lutterworth, 1950) and move on to Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest (Penguin, 1956). There is also Sir John Kerr’s A Naturalist in the Chaco (CUP, 1950), a book sometimes erroneously given as A Naturist in the Chaco: this has led many a hopeful nudist badly astray and into the prickles.
THE JESUITS
There is an immense literature on this subject but the most accessible and romantic starter-for-ten is Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s A Vanished Arcadia (Century Classics, 1988). Voltaire’s Candide (Penguin, 1947) gives that skeptic’s amusing and not entirely inaccurate satire on the system. A serious history is Selim Abou’s The Jesuit Republic of the Guaranis (1609–1768) (Crossroad Herder, NY, 1997).
THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE WAR
Sir Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (London, 1870) is hard to get hold of – I had to order a copy from the stacks of the University of Mississippi – but well worth the effort. It is full of Burton’s characteristically pungent and wildly unpolitically correct comments on ‘woolly-pated negroes, high-yaller half-breeds, greasy dagoes’ and all the rest. Burton was pro-López, viz: ‘the bulldog tenacity and semi-compulsory heroism of a redskin Sparta.’ The weasel word ‘semi-compulsory’ shows how little Burton actually knew of what was happening. A sample Burton prejudice: ‘A revolver at night is as necessary as shoes … personally I may state in every transaction with Paraguayans they invariably cheated and robbed me, and that in truthfulness they proved themselves to be about on a par with the Hindus.’ Evidently, in Paraguay plus ça change …
George Frederick Masterman’s Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (S. Low, Son and Marston, 1870) is a must: he served under López, and only just escaped with his life: a fascinating portrait of the country in the mid-19th century. Charles Ames Washburn, US Consul in Asunción, was another who only just escaped from López by the skin of his teeth, and his The History of Paraguay (Boston, 1871) in 2 volumes is as anti-López as can be, but very graphic and well-written – he was a novelist, after all, and the narrative is gripping, even if you feel you might need a pinch or three of Cerebos.
MADAME LYNCH
Oceans of ink have been spilled on the subject of this lady – the most recent account being Sián Rees’s detailed and painstaking historical reconstruction The Shadows of Elisa Lynch (Hodder-Review, 2003). Alvin Brodsky’s Madame Lynch and Friend (Harper and Row, NY, 1975) is highly coloured and a good read, though it aroused considerable criticism on publication for its strong anti-López and anti-Lynch stance, and also for some silly mistakes – Brodsky has toucans and flying-fish darting about the River Paraguay at one point. Those authors who have not actually been to the country often come a cropper over Paraguay. A recent British female novelist, who shall remain nameless, had the River Paraguay sparkling and glittering at Asunción – in fact it resembles thick pea-soup at the best of times. An older though still evergreen classic on la Lynch is William E. Barret’s Woman on Horseback (Peter Davies, 1938).
THE AUSTRALIAN COMMUNISTS
The classic history is Gavin Souter’s magisterial A Peculiar People: the Australians in Paraguay (Angus & Robertson, 1968). While researching his book Souter was arrested for photographing a lamp post with bullet holes in Asunción, and held in the police cells for a day on suspicion of … what one wonders? When released he was interviewed by the notorious Pastor Coronel, chief torturer to Alfie Stroessner. A ‘souter’, incidentally, is the old Scots for a shoemaker, and ‘Pastor Coronel’ means ‘Colonel Shepherd’ in Spanish – a good soubriquet for a man with a picada, or electric torture-prod, no? A more recent lengthy account is Anne Whitehead’s chatty and discursive Paradise Mislaid: In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay (Queensland University Press, 1997). This is a good travel book in its own right, as well as a retelling of the New Australia and Cosme dramas.
NUEVA GERMANIA
Ben Macintyre’s superb Forgotten Fatherland (Picador, 1993) is an excellent, gripping read. He actually made the pilgrimage to the settlement upriver and then on horseback. Highly recommended just as an exciting and adventurous travel book alone.
STROESSNER, GENOCIDE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Richard Aren’s Genocide in Paraguay (TUP, 1976) is a collection of enlightening – and shocking – essays on the grim record. Norman Lewis’s The Missionaries (Picador, 1972) has a chapter on the sinister activities of the New Tribes Mission in the Paraguayan Chaco. Isabel Hilton’s interview with Stroessner ‘The General’ (Granta No. 31, 1990) gives a portrait of Alfie in his Brazilian exile in self-justificatory mood. Paul Lewis’s Paraguay Under Stroessner (University of North Carolina Press, 1980) goes into the whole epoch in detail.
NAZIS
For the dedicated conspiracy theorist nothing beats H. Thomas’s Doppelgängers (Fourth Estate, 1995). According to Thomas, leading Nazis including Hitler and Himmler had doubles killed in their place while they escaped to Argentina and Paraguay to meet up with Martin Bormann. Stalin believed this theory too – or at least pretended to – and he held the partially burnt corpses claimed to be of Hitler and Eva Braun. Gerald Posner’s Mengele records the escape of the ‘Angel of Death’ from Auschwitz to Paraguay and Brazil.
LITERATURE
The greatest novel written by a European about South America is probably Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, much of which is based on Paraguay during the López years. Although Louis de Bernières’s The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (Secker and Warburg, 1990) is supposed to be fantastical magical-realist fiction it is rather close to the Paraguayan reality, with pyragues, caña, torture, kidnapping, and towns called Asunción and Concepcióon. Before I went to Paraguay I read this book and thought it was silly, ridiculous, melodramatic and wildly overblown. Rereading it on my return I found it a rather sober and unsurprising chronicle of typical everyday rioplatano life. Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, The Supreme (Faber, 1986) is a dense, meaty, gripping read on the Dr Francia dictatorship – and by parallel with the stronato as well: in the same class as Gabriel García Márquez at his best. Graham Greene, alas, went to Paraguay too late, when his powers were fading. As a result, Travels With My Aunt (Bodley Head, 1969) and Ways of Escape (Vintage, 1999) are disappointing on Paraguay. Such a pity neither Ronald Firbank nor Evelyn Waugh visited the country and so never wrote about the place – it might have been created for their pens.
A more lengthy extended bibliography for those who really want to go into Paraguay in depth is given at the end of John Gimlette’s At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig.
About the Author
ROBERT CARVER is
the author of the critically acclaimed The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award. Born in England, he was brought up in Cyprus, Turkey and India. Educated at the Scuola Medici, Florence, and Durham University, where he read Oriental Studies and Politics, he taught English in a maximum security gaol in Australia, and worked as a BBC World Service reporter in Eastern Europe and the Levant. Four of his plays have been broadcast by the BBC. He reviews for the Daily Mail and TLS, and has written for the Sunday Times, the Observer, and the Daily Telegraph, among other papers.
By the Same Author
Ariel at Bay: Reflections on Broadcasting and the Arts (ed.)
The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania
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