The News from Paraguay: A Novel

Author - Lily Tuck ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Harper Perennial was reviewed on 12-Dec-2008.

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1) Paperback Book The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Harper Perennial. A fictionalized account of Francisco Solano Lopez, dictator and erstwhile Napoleanic Emperor of Paraguay, and his Irish mistress Ella in the mid 1800s. As the author notes in the "Author´s Note" at the end of the book, it is the most bizarre elements of this story that are most likely to be historical, and indeed it does seem so, based on what I have read of this odd, secluded place and time. The fictional element of the story is OK, not great.

Seemingly a condensed and modernized version of Conrad´s Nostromo (Lord Jim : The Nigger of the ´Narcissus´ : Typhoon : Nostromo : The Secret agent), which I reviewed as being like a movie filmed with the camera left running without direction; this novel might be heavily edited vignettes from that camera.¤

2) Paperback Book The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Harper Perennial. Lilly Tuck grabbed a couple of wonderful historical figures and has written a truly wretched novel. Francisco Solano Lopez and Eliza Lynch were the Paraguayan power couple who looted shamelessly and drove their poor country to near total destruction in the 1860´s. Their story will make a fine book some day, alas that day is not today. Tuck has given us wooden cut-outs where real people should be, a story with loose ends and meaningless sub-plots and don´t even get me started on her silly sex scenes. In sum, don´t even think of wasting your time on this book.¤

3) Paperback Book The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Harper Perennial. The saving grace of this chronicle about the rise (and fall) of a Paraguayan dictator and his mistress is the elaborately descriptive imagery that transforms the country from a picture to a living, breathing entity. The novel has its humorous, deeply clever moments as well, but these are few and far between. Written from the points of view of many different characters, one never gets inside the heads of any of them - not even Ella Lynch, a selfish courtesan, or Lopez, the megalomaniacal President - and are so shallowly drawn that their fates don´t even matter to the reader. The rest of the characters´ minor plots are interwoven throughout the poorly-charted story line, but it is unsatisfying, because they never quite develop or play any major part. In fact, there really is no major part - the flow is continuously flat and one-dimensional. It´s tough to get through Tuck´s strangely unbelievable novel once the reader realizes that nothing is happening. The insight into a little-known aspect of history and some of the secondary characters make taking the time to read The News from Paraguay worth it, but otherwise, it is skippable.¤

4) Paperback Book The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Harper Perennial. This novel seems to inspire passionate reviews, mostly negative. No, I don´t think it is up to the standards of the National Book Award. And I can´t comment on the errors in Spanish that so many readers have noted, since I don´t speak Spanish. In the interests of full disclosure, I´ll also admit that I read it on a plane, where it was the alternative to some stupid movie. For what they´re worth, here are my thoughts. First, what I think many people find unsatisfying is the point of view. While we do get to know, sometimes, what Ella Lynch, the main character, is thinking, we mostly see the characters from the outside, objectively, without knowing very much about their thoughts. On the other hand, the detail is lush, conjuring up images of heat, brilliant color, dirt, opulence, decay. And the novel is essentially cinematic: it frames an incident, then moves to another. Characters appear and reappear, drifting into view like tropical fish in an enormous tank. The novel may not be entirely pleasing, but it is interesting. Perhaps Tuck wrote the novel with the screenplay in mind.¤

5) Paperback Book The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Harper Perennial. The first third of this book is tedious. There is no real device that drives opening of the novel forward. The romance between Franco Solano and Ella Lynch is predictable--it is after all, history. The narrator makes no attempt to build tension. Ella and Franco´s trip to Paraguay is only mildly interesting. Ella´s first impressions of Paraguay fall far short of the full exotic potential. The characters don´t really want anything. There is no real tension between characters or between character and landscape. Tension is mentioned on occasions, but the tension (such as that which exists between Ella and Franco´s fat sisters, or between Franco and his brothers) takes place off-stage. We never really see it and therefore it does not really matter.

The book is told through a series of anecdotes from a variety of perspectives. In the opening of the book, the characters are circumstantially connected. So what we get is a bunch of circumstantially connected anecdotes in relatively tensionless environments where the exoticism of landscape and people is never really explored. People are simply going about their lives in a far-off, sleepy place.

But thankfully it gets better. And really, the novel would not work if the beginning were any different. If I took one thing away from this novel, it is the importance of pacing--the idea that in a novel, unlike a short story, the writer has the space to use the pace of events and the contrast of worlds to show movement.

Each and every thing that each and every character possesses at the opening of the novel--from Franco´s gastronomic and sexual appetite to the country of Paraguay and the city of Paris--everything is ruined. The destruction of that opening world in complete.

The destruction begins at the midpoint of the novel--chapter 9. Franco has an abscessed tooth that must be removed. "Franco sat up and spat a cheesy, puslike liquid into the basin...In spite of herself, the reek made (Ella) draw away and some of the cheesy, puslike stuff fell onto Ella´s silk shoe." And from there, everything falls apart. The world created is then piece by piece, person by person, bond by bond, felled.

The anecdotes are also told out of sequence. Again, this deflates tension. We know that Franco dies, before we learn how he dies. We know that Ella escapes and moves back to London, before we know how she escapes. We know that little Pancho dies, before we know how he dies. And what this knowledge does is draw our focus to the way in which events transpire rather than their uncertainty. It is the way history works and a creative and ambitious way to structure a novel.

It is also interesting to note that the tension of want--the desire typical of story tension, is abundant in the second half of the novel. In each small passage, each character wants something. Sometimes they want the small things that war takes away--food, comfort. Sometimes they want the destructive things that war brings--they rape, murder, pillage. Sometimes it is the reader who finds himself wanting characters to be in some small way decent. And perhaps that is the most intriguing tension of this book--the writer never gives the reader what he wants. A dangerous thing to do.

This is a daring novel worthy of praise.¤

6) Paperback Book The News from Paraguay: A Novel by Harper Perennial.

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover´s ill-fated imperial dream -- one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.
With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 9-Jan-2009, 00609348679780739451595, 670-990-610-370-690-991-8

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