Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
#Paraguayan
blurb
Dilara
I the Supreme | Augusto Roa Bastos
post image

This is a bit of a slog and I had to extend my library loan. The ideal reader would be someone with a deep and wide knowledge of #Paraguayan culture and history, who knows Spanish, Guarani and Portuguese, enjoys puns and erudite jokes, and is reasonably well-versed in Enlightenment philosophy and 18-century history.

#FoodandLit
@Catsandbooks @Texreader

Picture of the Supreme - a grumpy-looking José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia - from Wikipedia

Bookwomble It sounds like that person is most likely to be Augusto Roa Bastos! 11mo
Catsandbooks Sounds like a tough read. Good luck! 11mo
Dilara @Catsandbooks Thanks! It's rewarding enough that I don't want to abandon it, but it is testing my willpower... 11mo
Dilara @Bookwomble Yes 😆 😁. The fact that Latin America was almost completely absent from my school curriculum growing up (in France, but it probably was pretty much the same in the rest of Europe - I hope it was different in North America) doesn't help. Thank heaven for Wikipedia! 11mo
Bookwomble @Dilara I grew up (to a degree!) in Britain, and was taught nothing about South America. Thank goodness we have books to fill in these blanks in our cultural maps 🌎😊 11mo
34 likes5 comments
blurb
Dilara
I the Supreme | Helen R. Lane, Augusto Antonio Roa Bastos
post image

I was able to borrow this #Paraguayan classic hidden in the stacks. There was a pristine library bookmark hidden in it. The number of digits in the phone number provided on the verso dates it to the nineties 😲
I'm about a third of the way through: the writing's a bit over the top, which gets tiring after a while, so I'm reading it in small installments.

#FoodandLit
@Catsandbooks @Texreader

Dilara It is written in the voice of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, a 19th-century dictator of Paraguay. Wikipedia tells me he was inspired by the Enlightenment and Rousseau. That is very intriguing. Also, he forbade white Paraguayans from intermarrying - they had to marry black, mulatto, native American or mestizo people. This happened in the early 19th century and must have horrified the majority of white people further North! 12mo
30 likes1 stack add1 comment