- Paperback: 248 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; (Reissue) edition (2 July 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007207999
- ISBN-13: 978-0007207992
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.4 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 623,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The News from Paraguay
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Product Description
Review
‘Tuck’s prose is elegant, the subject well researched.’ New York Times Book Review
‘The episodic style achieves many lovely moments. Images are so vivid you can almost smell them.’ Washington Post Book World
‘Decorous detail and vivid imagery…Reading “The News from Paraguay” feels like looking into a crystal ball: seeing pieces of a garden, storm clouds building, lives passing.’ Los Angeles Times
‘A tense, elegant novel…Paraguay emerges as Tuck’s characters do, imperceptibly, until the sounds, smells, and colors of the country saturate the pages.’ Boston Globe
‘Tuck’s knack for shaving a scene to its essence feeds the book’s speedy pace. And when linked, such snapshots build a portrait of a lost place and time.’ San Francisco Chronicle
Guardian
'Arresting events, grand amours and ruthless despotism form a heady cocktail...where the past appears vividly contemporary.’
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First Sentence
From him it began with a feather. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
From him it began with a feather. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this as the last choice in a 3-for-2 paperback offer (Hrabal's England and Miller's Clichy caught my eye first), but had a gut feeling that Tuck's Paraguay would come out top. After devouring all three masterworks, I'm happy to say the voice was right. This is a beautiful and powerful novel, narrated in effortless prose and capturing the spirit of the time as well as place. Tolstoy and Flaubert come to mind constantly. Black marks to Harper for missing/superfluous accents on too many pages, as well as the odd linguistic howler, but Anglo publishers don't care about standards of Castellano. In any case, a lovely, lovely book which I cannot recommend too highly.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Those that have studied South American history or are interested in doing so will find this novel extremely interesting, since the author collected as much historical evidence as she could and filled in the voids with clever fiction based on these facts. Lily Tuck presents an interesting character, Francisco Solano Lopez, focusing the story and developing the action around his mistress, Ella Lynch. La Ella, as she was called by the locals, had an importance and notoriety similar to the one achieved by Eva Peron in Argentina. The narration consists of a mixture of short passages from different sources: snippets of Ella's personal diary and letters, descriptions of events that took place during that time and scenes among the different characters. These bring the story nicely to life.
Franco's father sent him to Europe in the year 1854 as an ambassador, and in France he met and was mesmerized by Ella. She was nineteen years old and already a widow, but had so much life and desire to live in her that could charm any man and surmount any obstacle. Her personal diary shows this vitality, and when the years go by, we witness the slow withering of her passion and feistiness. From the start, we also see Franco's feistiness, which differs with Ella's in one very important aspect: while hers was positive and good-natured, his was capricious and envious.
Francisco Solano Lopez seduced Ella and took her with him to Paraguay. At this point is the only time in the story in which we can observe a positive desire in Franco, since he wanted to make Paraguay a better place. However, the real Franco surfaced fast enough, when during the trip home his temper showed up uninvited and the poor servants and underlings suffered the consequences. Upon his arrival in Paraguay, Franco started experiencing an urge for power that was fulfilled in part by the death of his father and his appointment as new dictator. Nevertheless, this did not quench his thirst as he wanted to emulate Napoleon's imperialism. This desire to dominate larger empires led him to confrontations with other countries, which ended with one of the biggest wars in the history of Paraguay, what was called as the war of the Triple Alianza. Although this war was not entirely Francisco Solano Lopez's fault as the narration leads us to believe, his arrogant and pushy behavior gave the other three countries, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay and excuse to exterminate most of the Paraguayan population.
I wish I had had books in my childhood narrating history the way this one does. The characters come to life and their motivations are easy to understand, making all the historical facts that result from their actions completely logical too. Even though I was born in Uruguay and lived there a good part of my life, I found stories here that helped me understand situations that I did not fully comprehend before. With the exception of the reasons behind the war of the Triple Alianza, this is a highly recommended read.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
45 reviews
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful
How did this book get published?
19 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover
From about the second page of this book, I was shaking my head in disbelief that anyone would publish it. The characters and their relationships are so poorly developed you are left with a blur of images lacking connection to one another. Add to that the stereotypical characters (the men are all violent and lusting either for girls or boys, the women are all "large-assed" or fat with the exception of Ella). And the gratuitous sentence or two at the end of each section about various characters' sexual proclivities was so completely dumb, not to mention kind of repulsive (I like a good sex scene as much as the next person, but Tuck's descriptions are completely banal).
Oh wait, there's more. The Spanish is ATROCIOUS. It's hard to believe that Tuck had a translator for this book. It's pretty clear that whoever copy edited it neither reads nor writes nor speaks Spanish. Half the names are grammatically incorrect. Many of the words are just plain wrong ("vita" means life in Italian, not Spanish, for starters). I felt embarrased for the author. Does she know that her book is full of errors?
The one word that comes to mind when thinking about this book is: SHALLOW. I sincerely hope that readers don't mistake this book for historical fiction. The author clearly knows little about Paraguay and its people and history, and clearly doesn't care, from her superficial treatment of it.
Oh wait, there's more. The Spanish is ATROCIOUS. It's hard to believe that Tuck had a translator for this book. It's pretty clear that whoever copy edited it neither reads nor writes nor speaks Spanish. Half the names are grammatically incorrect. Many of the words are just plain wrong ("vita" means life in Italian, not Spanish, for starters). I felt embarrased for the author. Does she know that her book is full of errors?
The one word that comes to mind when thinking about this book is: SHALLOW. I sincerely hope that readers don't mistake this book for historical fiction. The author clearly knows little about Paraguay and its people and history, and clearly doesn't care, from her superficial treatment of it.
36 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Wow. . . this book stunk
20 July 2005
Format:Paperback
This book focuses primarily upon two real-life characters: Ella Lynch, an attractive Irish courtesan, and Franco, a Paraguayan dictactor-in-the-making. The story begans with Ella in Paris as she is dumped by her Russian count lover. Franco, also in Paris, admires her from afar as he first views her adeptly riding a horse. He then unrelentingly courts her. After seemingly one night with Franco, she packs up with him and goes to Paraguay.
In the beginning, I admit that I liked it because there was a sense of foreboding and danger as she follows Franco, who is showing signs of brutality, to Paraguay, an isolated country unfriendly to outsiders which Franco's family runs. I thought- how will this turn out? Will there be conflict between them? Will she get homesick? Will he beat her, trap her, or kill her? Will she escape back to Paris?
None of those things. In fact, the moment she steps onto Paraguayan soil, the plot stops. Ella becomes a shallow, superficial character who cares more about her fancy clothes even though she seems to recognize what a brutal tyrant her care-giver is. Franco wages wars that were never explained or fully realized, except to provide you with snippets of battles here and there. The author chooses to present Ella one-dimensionally and Franco, even more so. Thus, you never really attach yourself to either one.
In the "end" (if you can call it that), I thought, what was the point? Were you supposed to like Ella and sympathize with her? Were you supposed to think, "that's what she gets because she's so shallow?"
Overall, while the author exhibits some writing talent (i.e., she can cobble together some beautiful sentences), she cannot tell a story.
Avoid at all costs. I say that rarely disliking any book I read.
In the beginning, I admit that I liked it because there was a sense of foreboding and danger as she follows Franco, who is showing signs of brutality, to Paraguay, an isolated country unfriendly to outsiders which Franco's family runs. I thought- how will this turn out? Will there be conflict between them? Will she get homesick? Will he beat her, trap her, or kill her? Will she escape back to Paris?
None of those things. In fact, the moment she steps onto Paraguayan soil, the plot stops. Ella becomes a shallow, superficial character who cares more about her fancy clothes even though she seems to recognize what a brutal tyrant her care-giver is. Franco wages wars that were never explained or fully realized, except to provide you with snippets of battles here and there. The author chooses to present Ella one-dimensionally and Franco, even more so. Thus, you never really attach yourself to either one.
In the "end" (if you can call it that), I thought, what was the point? Were you supposed to like Ella and sympathize with her? Were you supposed to think, "that's what she gets because she's so shallow?"
Overall, while the author exhibits some writing talent (i.e., she can cobble together some beautiful sentences), she cannot tell a story.
Avoid at all costs. I say that rarely disliking any book I read.
52 of 60 people found the following review helpful
What's happened to the National Book Award?
12 Jan 2005
Format:Hardcover
I expected so much from this book and purposely did not read any other customer reviews before picking it up. This was highly disappointing. The descriptions of life in 19th century Paraguay could have been gleaned from surfing the Internet, the characters were one-dimensional. The style, episodic and random, was distracting, not original, if originality was the purpose. I so wanted to like this book since I've been puzzled by the finalists the National Book Award has chosen lately. But it did not deliver.
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