The News from Paraguay
by Lily Tuck
Summary
Paris, 1854: Francisco Solano López, the stout, vain son of Paraguay's dictator, on a European shopping tour for uniforms and ideas, sees a red haired Irishwoman riding in the Bois de Boulogne. Ella Lynch is nineteen, beautiful, married once already, living by her wits at the edge of the courtesan world, and she makes the calculation of her life: she follows the heir of a country she cannot find on a map back across the ocean.
Tuck tells what follows in fragments, letters, diary entries, dispatches and vignettes, a mosaic that suits a story too strange for a straight line. In Asunción Ella becomes the most powerful woman in Paraguay without ever being marriageable, bearing Franco five sons, presiding over a court that apes Paris in the jungle, enduring the heat, the gossip and the astonishing etiquette of a landlocked dictatorship. Then Franco inherits, and his Napoleonic dreams take Paraguay into the War of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay at once, the most lethal war in South American history, which kills most of the country's male population and grinds toward a finale of retreat, paranoia, executions, Franco's death in the last skirmish and Ella burying him and their eldest son with her own hands.
The horror arrives, as it did, in increments, while the dresses are still being fitted.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, cool, quick and pitiless.
Best for readers who want history's most improbable consort story told without romance, an empire of vanity audited from inside.
Historical Context & Significance
The News from Paraguay won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2004, the stormiest year in the prize's modern history: all five finalists were women from New York, most of them little known, and the publishing industry complained loudly that the judges had chosen obscurity on purpose; the argument about what prizes are for ran through the ceremony itself. Tuck's win did not settle the critics: reviews ran from admiration for the research and the cool command to complaints that the sprawl overwhelmed the story.
Lily Tuck, born in Paris and a novelist of spare, cosmopolitan fictions, took the True History warning seriously: her afterword is candid about invention, and the historical Eliza Lynch, reviled in Argentina and eventually rehabilitated as a national heroine in Paraguay, has since attracted a small shelf of rival novels and biographies.
The War of the Triple Alliance, which killed perhaps sixty percent of Paraguay's population, remains almost unknown to Anglophone readers; this short novel is most of what they have of it, and it does not soften the arithmetic.