The ongoing conversation between Jose Gaspar Rodriguez Francia, the dying Supreme Dictator of Paraguay, and Policarpo Patino, his longtime secretary and much-abused servant, is periodically juxtaposed with official, and often contradictory, accounts of Francia's life and actions

Review

The most magnificent work, most magnificently translated, to come from Spanish into English in almost a quarter of a century . . . Sort of a political As I Lay Dying by way of Tristram Shandy. Every textual fold is pleated by sumptuous wordplay; arcane, absurd, and (mostly) accurate annotation and quotation; as well as fact so much stranger than fiction that nobody knows what evil lurks in the mind of what possible man.

I the Supreme was first published in Spanish in 1974. It is a shame that we have had to wait for so long for its publication in English, for its breadth of vision and ambition make it important in any language.

Now that a superb English translation of this dauntingly complex work is at last available, readers in this country will be in a position to see for themselves why Latin American critics have been moved to invoke the names of Joyce and Musil, Cervantes and Rabelais to describe the breadth and ambition of I the Supreme.

A text of a verbal density that recalls the later James Joyce, a web of intertextual reference never seen in modern Spanish outside of Borges, Roa Bastos' novel has challenged and fascinated thousands of readers around the world . . . A highly serious yet comic novel.

These passages reverberate with a fierce surrealism peopled with dwarves, women warriors and clairvoyant animals; studded with Borgesian images of mirrors and labyrinths, mystical eggs and blankets made of batskin, and embroidered with subsidiary tales about madness, death, and humiliation . . . A prodigious meditation not only on history and power, but also on the nature of language itself.

The novel's true achievement is one of tone and voice. The language is a triumph almost as much for the translator as for the author: ebulliently resourceful, brilliant in its vitriol and vituperation, rabelaisian in its extravagance.

Augusto Roa Bastos is himself a supreme find, maybe the most complex and brilliant Latin American novelist of all . . . What a glory of echoing voices this Paraguayan portmanteau is, more Joycean than Cortazar's Hopscotch, every bit as volcanic and visionary as Lezama Lima's Paradiso or Osman Lins's Avalovara . . . I the Supreme is a work of graceful, voluminous genius, an Everest of fiction.

A richly textured, brilliant book an impressive portrait, not only of El Supremo, but of a whole colonial society in the throes of learning how to swim, or how best to drown, in the seas of national independence . . . I the Supreme is one of the milestones of the Latin American novel.

I the Suprem

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