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#Paraguayan
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Dilara
I the Supreme | Augusto Roa Bastos
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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! 1y
Catsandbooks Sounds like a tough read. Good luck! 1y
Dilara @Catsandbooks Thanks! It's rewarding enough that I don't want to abandon it, but it is testing my willpower... 1y
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! 1y
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 🌎😊 1y
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Dilara
I the Supreme | Helen R. Lane, Augusto Antonio Roa Bastos
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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! 1y
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