Books from Paraguay
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay
John Gimlette's travel account follows his journeys across Paraguay, a landlocked country he describes as an island surrounded by land. The book moves between drawing rooms in Asuncion, the capital, and the Chaco, a western territory covering about two thirds of the country. The War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s killed a large share of Paraguayans, and that loss still shapes national memory.
Gimlette follows both historical figures and living ones. Among them is Eliza Lynch, the Irish woman who rose to remarkable prominence in nineteenth-century Paraguay. He also visits Mennonite settlers in the Chaco, notes the former Nazis who found refuge here after the Second World War, and meets indigenous communities whose presence predates all of them. Armadillos, jaguars and lungfish appear along the way.
The Chaco itself is described as harsh terrain of heat, thirst and snakes, a landscape that resists easy travel. Elsewhere Gimlette records habits that sit oddly together: smuggling networks, harp music, Caledonian balls, Worcestershire sauce on local tables, and the volunteers who offered to fight for Britain during the Falklands War. Paraguay, he notes, long lacked a guidebook of its own.
Plot
Haven to Nazis, smugglers’ paradise, home to some of the earth’s oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer’s sang-froid, a historian’s erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror and–yes–charm of South America’s obscure and remote “island surrounded by land.” He takes readers from genteel drawing rooms in Asuncion–where ladies still gossip about the nineteenth-century Irish adventuress who became Paraguay’s Empress to the “Green Hell” of the Chaco, a vast, inhospitable tract populated by aging Mennonites and discouraged Indians.
