The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch [Hardcover]

Anne Enright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2003

Anne Enright's novels What Are You Like? and The Wig My Father Wore have established her as a stunning young writer of international caliber. This award-winning author now delivers an astonishing, rich tour de force based on the life of a woman truly larger than life: Eliza Lynch, the nineteenth-century Irishwoman who became Paraguay's Eva Peron. Beautiful, sophisticated, and adventurous, Eliza Lynch met Francisco Solano Lopez in Paris when she was nineteen and he was in Europe to recruit engineers for the first railroad in South America. He left for Paraguay several months later with a pregnant Eliza beside him. Reviled by Asuncion society and her lover's family, Eliza built herself a fine house, constructed a national theater for Paraguay, and had her son baptized, although he was a bastard. In less than a decade, Lopez became dictator of the nation and plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza had become notorious -- as both the angel of the battlefield, inspiring the troops, and the demon driving Lopez's ambition. At one time the richest woman in the world, she was said to lead the retreat of the army in a black coach followed by carriages conveying her enormous wardrobe of Paris gowns. When Lopez was killed by the Brazilian army, she buried him in a shallow grave dug with her own hands. Anne Enright has written a gorgeous, deeply resonant novel about this extraordinary woman, following the arc of a life from the joyous sting of meeting Lopez, to burying him alone in a Paraguayan Golgotha. It is a novel of epic love and epic destruction, and an accomplishment that brings Anne Enright's immense talent to full flower.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Another Eva? Whitbread finalist Enright reimagines the life of Eliza Lynch, the 19th-century Irishwoman who became mistress to Paraguayan dictator Solano Lopez.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In a story that is as rich and exotic as its setting, Paraguay in the 1850s, Irish writer Enright's third novel envisions the life of the woman who became that country's Eva Peron. Eliza, extraordinarily beautiful, charming, and intelligent, meets Francisco Lopez, eldest son of the Paraguayan dictator then in power, in Paris, then goes home with him, pregnant with his child. Ostracized by her lover's family, indeed by all of the local society, Eliza survives in a grand manner and becomes both greatly admired for her kindness and reviled for what is presumed to be her political sway. Enright matches Eliza's narration with that of Stewart's, an alcoholic doctor brought from Europe to the wilderness to tend to Eliza during childbirth, thus providing a diversity of voice and point of view that much enhances the tale. With a style vastly unlike that of her two previous novels, Enright artfully explores the power of beauty and the beauty of power, and finds them remarkably similar as neither leads to a good end. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871138689
• ISBN-13: 978-0871138682
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,741,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The type of novel that gives bad novelists, a bad name, July 15, 2007

By 

Gerard M. Meagher (Limerick,Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A Novel (Paperback)

This is a work that has neither style nor substance. The first eleven pages in which Enright gives a supposed blow-by-blow account of "Eliza's" lovemaking with Lopez is obviously meant to titillate and arrest the reader's senses. It fails miserably. I was nauseated.
This severely disjointed narrative in no way mirrors the real Elisa. I have in my library over thirty books that deal with Elisa Lynch including many by contemporaries who knew her well. None of these accounts, even those written by her most ardent critics, would ever portray Elisa as the cheap tart that Enright serves up to us.
This book can at best be described as a hastily drafted piece of sensationalist Pulp Fiction. At worst it is a malicious attempt to defame (albeit through allegory) a most cultured and enigmatic heroine who survived some of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century (The Irish Famine, The Bloody Algerian Campaign, and finally the War of the Triple Alliance in which over 90% of the male population of Paraguay her adopted country perished) and yet, even in her darkest hour she was magnificent. This is a woman who stopped the entire Brazilian Army in its murderous campaign to permanently annihilate the Paraguan race, by the simple act of burying the mutilated bodies of her eldest son and her Life companion Solano Lopez with her bare hands in the raw red earth of Cerro Cora, while that same Army watched from a distance in silence and awe.
The real story of Elisa Lynch and Solano Lopez is a Love story, full of courage, bravery and loyalty. It's breadth and scope cannot be sensed within the mangled historical inaccuracies and most shameful abuse of the truth contained in this rather trashy piece of verbiage, which to quote Enright in her acknowledgements section " It is around these facts that this (scarcely less than fictional) account has been built.
Based on this offering I can only conclude that this is the type of novel that gives bad novelists, a bad name

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical fiction in Paraguay, April 6, 2008

By 

Imogen (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Hardcover)

Anne Enright, who won the Booker Prize for The Gathering has fictionalized the life of Eliza Lynch, a nineteenth century Irish woman, who by way of the role of Parisian courtesan, becomes the lover of the emergent political leader of Paraguay. Its chapters are a mix of different narrators, usually Lynch or the medical doctor Stewart, and time is not represented chronologically. Nevertheless there are some very raw scenes exposed on the Rio Parana, in Lynch's early life, and in various villages in Paraguay during conflict with the Brazilians and Argentinians. It seems that none of the characters are lionized, nor are they truly evil; and the author seems to surprise the reader by controverting this or that judgment about a particular character. The vivid picture Enright paints is full of colorful contrasts of this woman.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Maligned figure, well-written book, February 21, 2005

By 

DM (Ottawa Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Hardcover)

I had read a recent(and somewhat misogynist)biography of this woman, the Irish courtesan Eliza Lynch, before starting this book. The author of this novel, Anne Enright, seems to have her history right: Lynch met the Paraguayan dictator Lopez in Paris and became pregnant by him before returning with him to Paraguay. There, she was reviled by high and low, probably because she was considered shameless (she did not hide her relationship with Lopez), tried to bring Parisian "culture" to this backwater, helped herself to the country's wealth (it was rich in yerba maté) and encouraged Lopez in his grandiose ambitions, resulting in simultaneous war with Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina; a war that killed tens of thouands, saw the country's wealth destroyed and Lopez himself lose his life. Historic sources say that Lynch not only did nothing to restrain Lopez's brutality, but even added to it by seeking revenge against those among Paraguayan society (such as Lopez's family) who disdained her.Enright, writing in the third and first person (Lynch herself), brings this story to life vividly, especially in describing Lynch's first trip upriver to Asunción. Her language is colourful and evocative. The story, still sticking to history, ends with Lynch, having survived Lopez, Paraguay and the war, now in the UK and seeking damages against one of the few Europeans, a Scottish doctor named Stewart, who had remained loyal to her and her husband. History, and even this book, paints her as unsympathetic, but so seems everyone (including those who loathed her) in this sordid, brutal bit of history.