The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

Paraguay is in South America, squeezed between Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. It became independent from Spain in 1811, but was not recognized by any other countries for over 30 years. The three awful events of Paraguayan history are the War of the Triple Alliance, from 1864-1870, which they lost to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay; the Chaco War against Bolivia in 1932-35, which they won; and the brutal and isolationist dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989 (Europe was not the only place where revolutions happened that latter year). His right-wing Colorado Party have won every presidential election but one since 1948.

These days Paraguay is best known for the Itaipu Dam on the River Parana, shared with Brazil, the largest hydro-electric dam in the world outside China. The official languages are Guaraní and Spanish, though given Paraguay’s close relationship with Brazil, Portuguese is widely understood and is thought to be the first language of as much as 20% of the population. The main exports are electricity from the dam, bought by Brazil, agricultural products, also bought by Brazil, and Chinese goods, imported into Paraguay and smuggled into Brazil.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Paraguay.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Zama	Antonio di Benedetto	3,961	612	502
The News from Paraguay	Lily Tuck	2,497	756	267
Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay	Susan Hood	2,152	545	321
The Drunken Forest	Gerald Durrell	2,117	690	177
I, the Supreme	Augusto Roa Bastos	1,029	660	82
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay	John Gimlette	775	327	78
Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche	Ben Macintyre	834	299	78
Son of Man	Augusto Roa Bastos	764	221	35

This week’s overall winner, Zama, also the Goodreads and StoryGraph winner, is considered one of the great novels of Argentine rather than Paraguayan literature; its protagonist, Don Diego de Zama, is stuck in Paraguay at the end of the eighteenth century, trying to get back to Argentina.

This week’s LibraryThing winner, The News from Paraguay, is one of several books that I found about the glamorous figure of Eliza Lynch (1833-86), from Cork by way of Paris, who at the age of 19 became the girlfriend of Francisco Solano López, the son of the President of Paraguay. When the President died in 1862, Francisco succeeded him, and Eliza was the First Lady of the country (though they never actually married) until Francisco was overthrown and killed in 1870 at the end of the war. She returned to Paris and died there.

Ada’s Violin is about impoverished children forming an orchestra with instruments made from material recycled from the city rubbish dump. It sounds a bit glurgy to be honest but reviews seem positive.

The Drunken Forest is one of Gerald Durrell’s earlier travel books about collecting animals for his zoo, in Argentina and Paraguay in 1954. The process is interrupted by a real-world political intrusion unusual in Durrell’s writing, when the 1954 coup that brought Alfredo Stroessner to power forces him and his wife to go home in a hurry, leaving behind most of the animals.

I, the Supreme is the top book on this list by a Paraguayan author. It is a fictionalized biography of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco, known as Doctor Francia, Paraguay’s first dictator who ruled from 1814-1840. Published in 1974, it was seen as commentary on the Stroessner regime (not least by Stroessner himself) and Roa Bastos was exiled.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a travel book about Paraguay from 2003.

Forgotten Fatherland traces another European woman who, like Eliza Lynch, had a Paraguayan adventure: Elizabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who set up the colony of Nueva Germania in Paraguay on Aryan and anti-Semitic principles in 1886. It collapsed almost immediately.

Son of Man, Roa Bastos’ second book in this week’s table, chronicles the struggles of the oppressed in Paraguay between 1912 and 1936 through a Biblically inspired magical realist lens.

The book that I hesitated about disqualifying is Novela B by Mónica Bustos, Paraguay’s best known contemporary woman writer, but the summaries of it that I found indicate that it is set across South America in various locations, so I deduce that less than half of it is in Paraguay. In fact none of her books appears to be set in Paraguay as far as I can tell.

The one woman writer who I find on all three systems and whose work does seem to be set in Paraguay is Josefina Plá. Although she was born in Spain, she adopted Paraguayan citizenship.

Paraguay figures in three books on my own shelves: Siân Rees’ The Shadows of Eliza Lynch is on the same subject as Lily Tuck’s book above; Paraguay (played by Spain in the TV series) is where Kessler ends up in the sequel to Secret Army and its novelisation; and one of the members of Brian Killick’s The Camelot Club invades Paraguay.

Back to Europe for the next two countries, Bulgaria and Serbia; then Congo (Brazzaville) and El Salvador.

From the Heart of Europe

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The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

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