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Anne Enright's imagination has voyaged far in the last four years since "What Are You Like?". Across the Atlantic Ocean in fact and up the Parana river to Paraguay in the company of her real-life heroine Eliza Lopez Lynch. Joining the rising tide of modern authors who choose to do "faction", a literary look at a historical person, we are given the story of Irish girl Eliza Lynch who journeys from Mallow to the Continent where she learns the life of a mid-19th century lady. Upon meeting Paraguay's revolutionary leader Francisco Lopez in Paris she travels as his mistress in the heart of his entourage to the dusty colonial capital of Ascuncion where she provides old-world style and culture to the macho new state of Parguay. Inevitable ruffling feathers, the uncrowned princess becomes both loathed and admired as the fledgling republic under Lopez begins to assert its weight bringing an increasingly unstable future.
Crucial to the narrative is the Scottish Doctor Stewart who joins Lopez's retinue and stays for many hung-over years, chronicling Eliza's travails and falling under her spell too. Eliza's voice is heard too along with a never-trustworthy third-person narrator who flits from head to head recording the awe and pity of a rise and fall from grace. Enright's writing has matured from flashy showiness to cool sharpness; see for example the second chapter at Eliza's evocative impressions as she voyages up the Parnana; or the witty epilogue which both brings the novel both to a conclusion and begs further investigation. If the novel has one fault it is that it is not long enough!
This novel is by far the best novel I've come across this year as Enright, the girl from the grey suburbs gives us a whirling torrent of "Nostromo"-meets-"Fitzcaraldo" in the muddy heart of South America.
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