The News From Paraguay (2004)

I went into this novel by Lily Tuck cold, thinking vaguely about a project involving National Book Award winners, and didn't suspect it was historical fiction until its events started to grow ridiculously improbable and I had to look them up to verify because they are so astonishing. You know, they say, truth is stranger... The News From Paraguay is basically about the disastrous war waged by the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano Lopez on Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in the mid-19th century. Franco is a main character and the other is Ella Lynch, his Irish mistress. He meets Lynch when he is in Europe for education and training with the Napoleonic army. The novel is fragmented and full of vignettes, composed of scenes in Paraguay and Paris intermixed with Lynch's correspondence and diary entries. Everyone involved is extravagantly foolish and many are very cruel. Franco, for example, routinely throws his political enemies and suspects in prison and tortures them. And he's probably more humanitarian than his father, except for that war, which reduced the Paraguayan population by half or more. As barbaric as they may be the events in this novel feel modern because they are objectively so absurd, rendered from such a distance. It's that brutally violent way of conducting politics and wielding power, with all the calculation and abstractions of dissociation. Aborigines are in the mix too, woven into the fabric of Paraguay society (mostly as servants, but with their language preserved). Lynch has five boys by Franco, plus a girl who dies as an infant, and always is regarded merely as his courtesan. His sisters and family won't recognize her or Franco's sons. Tuck's note at the end reminds us that the novel is historical fiction—some of these events more or less happened the way they're told. Others are wholly the invention of Tuck. That's the way it can go with historical fiction and the reason The News From Paraguay is cataloged as a novel. It starts out fine, funny and intriguing and strange, then lost some steam for me in the second half once it arrives at the terrible war. Ella Lynch is by far the most interesting character, though Franco's pathologies bear interest too and so do their children. And there are many wonderful minor characters with indelible little scenes. Definitely worth a look.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.