A curious story of love, risk and consequences reveals an era of Paraguayan history, with the country's landscape and people vividly evoked. The main characters are both native and European, the journey from the civilization of Paris in the mid-19th century to the churning mud and violence of a country in the hands of madmen.

Learned a lot about Paraguay (1854). Well written historical? novel about Franco Lopez and his First Lady/Mistress. In the first chapters -Paraguay went from a rich, isolated, exotic land - by the end of the book. - to devastation of the peoples and the lands. Greed and madness - nice tidy story with a woman to blame for all the bad things that happened.

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. ( )

Reviewers have compared this to novels by garcia marquez and vargas llosa, but i don't think the writers have much in common besides their subject matter - central and south america. depicting imperial ambition and human tragedy, the prose is sparse yet powerful when addressing the numerous atrocities committed by the paraguayan dictator in his misguided and disastrous war against his neighbors. kind of dragged on while i was reading it, but now that it's finnished, it's definitely something that stays with you. very realistic in the way it moves in and out of the lives of so many people, providing vivid vignettes that coalesce into paraguay itself, which in turn is connected to a broader, global picture through epistolary and ideological links to distant paris. ( )

3968. The News From Paraguay, by Lily Tuck (read 26 Dec 2004) This book won the National Book award for fiction this year, and that is why I read it since I am trying to read all such winners. Paraguay has been an interest of mine since I read a book on it in 1990. The book tells of Francisco Solano, who meets Ella Lynch in Paris in 1854, takes her to Paraguay where he eventually becomes dictator and involves the country in a disastrous war which ruins the county. As often with historical fiction, one wishes one knew what is true and what is made up. To the extent it is history the book is not bad, but it does not tell us where history leaves off and fiction begins. ( )