Customer Reviews

The News from Paraguay: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

By the time she is nineteen in 1854, Ella Lynch, an Irish beauty, is divorced and living in Paris, ready for a new romance. She finds her next paramour in the unlikely person of Francisco Solano Lopez, better known as the infamous Franco, the future dictator of Paraguay. Stout, dark and hirsute, Franco is immediately attracted to the blonde-haired Ella and determined to win her affections, showering her with expensive gifts. When Franco leaves Paris to return to his native Paraguay, Ella is by his side, where she will remain for many years. Although they never marry, she bears him five sons, an extraordinary fecund consort for the dictator.

Ella is a product of the Paris she so enjoyed, where she resided in elegant surroundings, spending her days at parties and royal fetes. For much of their time together, Franco is able to offer her much of the same, their days a continuous romantic adventure; never does she see him as the Emperor who has no clothes. Ella lives in a world of her own imagination, one of servants and plenty, her needs constantly attended, until Franco's war turns bad. Even then she follows him to the countryside until forced to flee for her safety.

The author approaches her subject with an eye to historical possibilities, filling in the lapses with vivid imagination, recreating a place and time long lost to memory. There is no question that Franco is a greatly flawed leader, a despot who deprives his citizens of their livelihood in an effort to establish Paraguay as a military power. His hubris costs the lives of many young men; torture and starvation descend upon the survivors, while Franco skirmishes to the bitter end, his decimated troops dwindling before the advancing swords of the Brazilians.

The author recreates the brilliant and exotic Paraguayan landscape, a lush background for the unfolding drama of an ill-conceived war. Tuck's Ella is a self-absorbed, spoiled woman whose beauty allows her to rise above the poverty and turmoil of ordinary life. She turns a blind eye to Franco's arrogance and destruction and never questions his ability to rule. This is a fascinating view of a couple who are defined by their physical differences, yet perhaps drawn together by their similarities. Tuck constructs a portrait of an exotic country, flourishing before it is gutted by one man's Napoleonic fantasies, his blonde, blue-eyed paramour proudly riding at his side. Luan Gaines/2004.

The most disappointing thing about The News from Paraguay is the beginning, and not precisely because is a bad one, but because in the first chapters of Lily Tuck National Prize awarded novel, there's a hint that could have been better than it turn out to be.
So I confess that for a few pages (those that engage a reader with a book) I found charming the decimononic story of Ella Lynch, a beautiful widow living in Paris well beyond her means. That even when Ella decided to follow hairy Franco -a paraguayan stud- not because his looks, not even for this foolish thing called love, but because he smelled like luxury and power in a faraway land; I still found it a joyable read, but right when she arrived to her privileged life of "querida" of the most powerful man in Paraguay and began to have one baby after another in tumultuous times, The News from Paraguay became boring and I began to skip entire paragraphes until I got to a previsible end.
Based on true facts, the life of a Paraguayan dictator and his irish mistress; Tuck, who confessed that she never went and wasn't interested in ever going to Paraguay (i think she finally did) can't even get the spanish names right: Mañuel, instead of Manuel, Rosaria, instead of Rosario; Iñez, instead o Inés. What's the deal with the ñ?
Maybe I lost something in my not so good english, but I still can't get why, a so so novel like The news from Paraguay, can win a National Prize.

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.

There are numerous people who have written some terrible things about this novel. Now, I agree that it is the type of book that makes you wonder who really decides what warrants a National Book Award, but at the same time, the novel is not something that should be dismissed completely.

Tuck writes about the relationship between European born Ella and soon-to-be Paraguayan dictator Franco super-imposed upon the warring between Paraguay and its neighbors. What comes across very quickly is Franco's lust for power and his inability to stay faithful to his wife. The novel's title is in reference to the numerous correspondence between Ella and a friend she leaves in Paris.

The novel itself reminds me of Duras's The Lover. Stylistically, it shares the same short, seemingly disjointed narrative style, jumping from character to character, major ones to minor ones, spending as few as a couple of sentences to as much as a page or two from any one perspective. While for many, this style of writing lacks a kind of coherence and also does not hit you over the head with pages and pages of description, what Tuck has succeeded in is creating a landscape as rich and detailed in its own way as someone like Dickens. The emotional depth to her characters that many miss is wonderfully described and Ella's and Franco's distancing from one another is masterfully done.

Overall, this is a pleasurable read, but don't go into it thinking that you're going to find a novel as well-crafted as other novels who have won the prestigious award.

This was absolutely awful. None of the characters are well developed, so you really don't care about them at all. It's just a series of short little scenes about people getting killed or tortured in explicit, gory detail, alternating with people having sex or masturbating in explicit, gory detail. I only finished it because I was on a plane with nothing else to read.

Clara Peller's immortal line in the old burger commercials is ironically quite apt as a description of Lily Tuck's "The News from Paraguay." Although the characters in this historical novel feast on a surfeit of beef, the novel itself is all lightweight snack food. It's full of sex, war, violence, and history, yet it makes very little lasting impression. It focuses on a little-known historical event--a war in the 1860s involving Paraguay and its neighbors--but readers won't really gain any insight into the history nor will they delve deeply into the human heart.

As many other readers have expressed, I'm not at all clear about why this novel won the National Book Award. As historical fiction, it can't hold a candle to Ishigawa's World War II novels, Chang-Rae Lee's "A Gesture Life," or Frederick Busch's "The Night Inspector," just to mention a few recent wonderful historical novels.

There's much history here but very little art. Every page cries out, "Research!" But there's nothing memorable about the style or the characters. In the final chapter of the novel, Tuck continues to employ the multiple narrators and brief vignettes that she has used throughout, but for the only time in the novel, she occasionally moves backward and forward through time, the contrasts creating a few interesting sparks. However, throughout the novel's first 230 pages, she has methodically moved us through time in an unimaginatively plodding way. While other readers have noted the novel's violence, it is nowhere near as graphic as Madison Smartt Bell's trilogy about Toussiant L'Ouverture and the slave uprising in Haiti, but here the violence often seems prurient rather than illuminating, as it does in Bell's work. In all ways, this is a tremendously disappointing read. Perhaps Tuck's ambitions simply outran her ability. The novel is, ultimately, all sizzle and no steak.

Each person is entitled to enjoy a book without explanation but when the National Book Award goes to an offering of such pitiful quality, the people need to speak out to alerts others of what is really awaiting them. I am completely incredulous that this book could have won the National Book Award. My immediate reaction is that I read better books in elementary school. Often, I felt as if i was reading Seventeen magazine because the writing was so juvenile and the characters so one- dimensional. To make matters worse, the ubquitous use of foreign languages without translation or the ability to decipher the meaning from the context was really obnoxious and sometimes incorrect! If you're going to be condescending or faux literary, at least use spellcheck!

Quite simply, all I can say as that attempting to read this book caused a tremendous amount of pain and real longings to throw the book out of the moving bus. As i was traveling through Bolivia and without any reading material besides local newspapers, I had no choice but to journey on. However, after making it halfway through this award-winning novel, I decided it was much more enjoyable to sit in my plane seat and look at the safety card than to irritate myself any further with the ridiculous musings of beautiful, fair Ella Lynch and the stocky but sexually voracious Franco. Maybe Tuck can cut out the flimsy war stuff and send the rest of the text to Harlequin. A real lemon dressed in historical clothing!!