History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10 · Translated from Spanish (original title Yo el Supremo)

• Accuracy: Built on documents and legends about José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, dictator of Paraguay from 1814 to 1840.
• Readability: Very demanding: shifting voices, fragments, footnotes and wordplay.
• Plot: The dying dictator dictates to his secretary and argues with his own legend as history closes in.

Doctor Francia ruled Paraguay for decades, isolating the country from the world and governing with absolute power. He was known simply as El Supremo. Augusto Roa Bastos’s novel takes the form of his dictation to his secretary, Policarpo Patiño, interrupted by the dictator’s private notebook, documents and the notes of a modern compiler.

The book is less a story than an interrogation of power and language. Francia argues with historians, mocks his enemies and meditates on writing, memory and authority. The shifting voices blur the line between history and fiction.

Roa Bastos, who lived in exile from Paraguay’s later dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, wrote a novel that is also a commentary on dictatorship in general. It became one of the key works of the Latin American dictator novel, alongside The Autumn of the Patriarch and Reasons of State.

The novel’s density is its challenge. Much of the language is allusive, with puns, invented words and references to Paraguayan history that many readers will not know. The translation by Helen Lane is heroic but cannot convey everything.

The 8 reflects an extraordinary, difficult and important novel. Roa Bastos won the Cervantes Prize in 1989, and this is his masterpiece, though many readers will admire it more than love it.