Download or read book I the Supreme written by Augusto Roa Bastos and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I the Supreme imagines a dialogue between the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator known as Dr. Francia and Policarpo Patiño, his secretary and only companion. The opening pages present a sign that they had found nailed to the wall of a cathedral, purportedly written by Dr. Francia himself and ordering the execution of all of his servants upon his death. This sign is quickly revealed to be a forgery, which takes leader and secretary into a larger discussion about the nature of truth: “In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie.” Their conversation broadens into an epic journey of the mind, stretching across the colonial history of their nation, filled with surrealist imagery, labyrinthine turns, and footnotes supplied by a mysterious “compiler.” A towering achievement from a foundational author of modern Latin American literature, I the Supreme is a darkly comic, deeply moving meditation on power and its abuse—and on the role of language in making and unmaking whole worlds.
Download or read book Son of Man written by Augusto Roa Bastos and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Augusto Roa Bastos s I the Supreme written by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roa Bastos's novel I the Supreme (1974), based on the 20 year reign of Paraguayan dictator Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (1766-1840), is one of the most famous and yet least understood works of contemporary Latin American fiction. Weldt-Basson analyzes Roa Bastos's seminal work by unraveling the rich web of both historical and nonhistorical intertextuality that is critical to an understanding of this novel. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book I the Supreme written by Augusto Roa Bastos and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I the Supreme imagines a dialogue between the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator known as Dr. Francia and Policarpo Patiño, his secretary and only companion. The opening pages present a sign that they had found nailed to the wall of a cathedral, purportedly written by Dr. Francia himself and ordering the execution of all of his servants upon his death. This sign is quickly revealed to be a forgery, which takes leader and secretary into a larger discussion about the nature of truth: “In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie.” Their conversation broadens into an epic journey of the mind, stretching across the colonial history of their nation, filled with surrealist imagery, labyrinthine turns, and footnotes supplied by a mysterious “compiler.” A towering achievement from a foundational author of modern Latin American literature, I the Supreme is a darkly comic, deeply moving meditation on power and its abuse—and on the role of language in making and unmaking whole worlds.
Download or read book Reasons of State written by Alejo Carpentier and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most significant novels in Latin American literature, written by Cuba's most important modern novelist—to win a bet with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the early 1970s, friends Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Roa Bastos and Alejo Carpentier reached a joint decision: they would each write a novel about the dictatorships then wreaking misery in Latin America. García Márquez went on to write The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos I, the Supreme. The third novel in this remarkable trinity is Reasons of State, hailed as the most significant novel ever to come out of Cuba. As with Garcia Marquez, Reasons of State is a bold story, boldly told --- daring in its perceptions, rich in lush detail, inventive in prose, and deadly compelling in its suspenseful plot. Inexplicably out of print for years, it tells the tale of the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country who has been living the life of luxury in high-society Paris. When news reaches him of a coup at home, he rushes back and crushes it with brutal military force. But returning to Paris he is given a chilly welcome, and learns that photographs of the atrocities have been circulating among his well-to-do friends. Meanwhile World War One has broken out, and another rebellion forces the dictator back across the ocean. As he struggles with the Marxist forces beginning to find footing in his own country, and Europe is devastated, Carpentier constructs a masterful and biting satire of the new world order.
Download or read book Postmodernism s Role in Latin American Literature written by H. Weldt-Basson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-06-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), winner of the prestigious Cervantes prize, is one of the most important Latin American writers of the twentieth century. This commemorative collection consists of articles by nine scholars reflecting upon the postmodern nature of the Paraguayan author s literary production and his place in world literature. The volume includes articles on the author s screenplays, his masterpiece, the dictator novel I The Supreme, his short stories, feminist approaches to Roa Bastos s novels, reflections on the writer s Guarani poetry, and a study of the complex, intertextual relationships between his novel El fiscal and his other texts.
Download or read book The Feast of the Goat written by Mario Vargas Llosa and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-11-09 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.
Download or read book The Campaign written by Carlos Fuentes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1991-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inflamed revolutionary democrat and the son of a wealthy Argentine ranch owner, Baltasar Bustos, kidnaps the child of the Marquise de Cabra in 19th century South America.
Download or read book At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig written by John Gimlette and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay–South America's darkly fabled, little-known “island surrounded by land.” Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book–equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide–breaches the boundaries of this isolated land,” and illuminates a little-understood place and its people. It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States. The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the “green hell” covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists–more or very-much-less peacefully–with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis. Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey.
Download or read book Santa Evita written by Tomas Eloy Martinez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-07-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of Latin America's finest writers comes a mesmerizing novel about life of the legendary Eva Peron, the famed wife of an Argentine dictator, told backwards from death to childhood. • Now a 7-part Limited Series on Hulu. Bigger than fiction, Eva Peron was the poor-trash girl who reinvented herself as a beauty, snared Argentina's dictator, reigned as uncrowned queen of the masses, and was struck down by cancer. When her desperate but foxy husband brings Europe's leading embalmer to Eva's deathbed to make her immortal, the fantastical comedy begins. "Finally, this is the novel I always wanted to read." —Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Download or read book The Ministry of Special Cases written by Nathan Englander and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-11-18 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, the debut novel from the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges casts a powerful spell. In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.
Download or read book Authoritarianism Cultural History and Political Resistance in Latin America written by Federico Pous and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes on the challenge of conceptually thinking Paraguayan cultural history within the broader field of Latin American studies. It presents original contributions to the study of Paraguayan culture from a variety of perspectives that include visual, literary, and cultural studies; gender studies, sociology, and political theory. The essays compiled here focus on the different narratives and political processes that shaped a country decentered from, but also deeply connected to, the rest of Latin America. Structured in four thematic sections, the book reflects upon authoritarianism; the tensions between modern, indigenous, and popular artistic expressions; the legacies of the Stroessner Regime, political resistance, and the struggle for collective memory; as well as the literary framing of historical trauma, particularly in connection with the Roabastian notion of la realidad que delira [delirious reality].
Download or read book Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Forms of Dictatorship written by Jennifer Harford Vargas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot D az, H ctor Tobar, Cristina Garc a, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form --- that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.
Download or read book The Dictator Novel written by Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But “dictator novels” do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics itself. The Dictator Novel positions novels about dictators as a vital genre in the literatures of the Global South. Primarily identified with Latin America, the dictator novel also has underacknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of francophone and anglophone Africa. Although scholars have noted similarities, this book is the first extensive comparative analysis of these traditions; it includes discussions of authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Esteban Echeverría, Ousmane Sembène , Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, and Ahmadou Kourouma. This juxtaposition illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre. In so doing, Armillas-Tiseyra puts forward a comparative model relevant to scholars working across the Global South.
Download or read book Mutual Impressions written by Ilan Stavans and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly assumed that the United States and Latin America, culturally so different, move artistically to very different rhythms. Also common is the assumption that, with rare exception, the literary figures on one side of the global North/South divide have had little interest in the work of their counterparts. With Mutual Impressions Ilan Stavans dispels these notions by showing how solid the bridges between writers and across borders have been, at least since the early days of this century, and how crucial they are likely to become as we enter the next millennium. Divided into symmetrical halves--South reading North and North reading South--the book presents essays by leading novelists, poets, and other writers that focus on the work of another literary figure from across the divide. Borges, for example, finds in Hawthorne the perfect precursor to his own interest in allegories; Katherine Anne Porter examines José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi as a rascal whose picaresque views of life in The Itching Parrot served to launch the Latin American novel; Cortázar's study of the plots and style of Poe shows an affinity that left an indelible mark on the Argentine's short fiction; Susan Sontag views Machado de Assis as the ultimate mirror, a proto-postmodernist. With other essays by Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, John Barth, Robert Coover, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Grace Paley, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Mark Strand, among others, Mutual Impressions offers a remarkable view of the connections that comprise a literary tradition of the Americas. It is a book that will surprise and enliven its readers as it informs and awakens in them a sense of wonder. Contributors. John Barth, José Bianco, Robert Bly, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Hiber Conteris, Robert Coover, Julio Cortázar, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Waldo Frank, Carlos Fuentes, William H. Gass, Nicolás Guillén, William Kennedy, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, José Martí, Pablo Neruda, Victoria Ocampo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Grace Paley, Octavio Paz, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Rexroth, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Barbara Probst Solomon, Susan Sontag, Ilan Stavans, Mark Strand, John Updike, Pedro Henríque Ureña, Derek Walcott, Paul West
Download or read book The Dictator s Dictation written by Robert Boyers and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-26 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these elegant essays, many of them originally written for The New Republic and Harper's, Robert Boyers examines the role of the political imagination in shaping the works of such important contemporary writers as W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer and Mario Vargas Llosa, Natalia Ginzburg and Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee and John Updike, V. S. Naipaul and Anita Desai. Occasionally he finds that politics actually figures very little in works that only pretend to be interested in politics. Elsewhere he discovers that certain writers are not equal to the political issues they take on or that their work is fatally compromised by complacency or wishful thinking. In the main, though, Boyers writes as a lover of great literature who wishes to understand how the best writers do justice to their own political obsessions without suggesting that everything is reducible to politics. Resisting the notion that novels can be effectively translated into ideas or positions, he resists as well the notion that art and politics must be held apart, lest works of fiction somehow be contaminated by their association with "real life" or public issues. The essays offer a combination of close reading, argument, and assessment. What, Boyers asks, is the relationship between form and substance in a work whose formal properties are particularly striking? Is it reasonable to think of a particular writer as "reactionary" merely because he presents an unflattering portrait of revolutionary activists or because he is less than optimistic about the future of newly independent societies? What is the status of private life in works set in politically tumultuous times? Can the novelist be "responsible" if he consistently refuses to engage the conditions that affect even the intimate lives of his characters? Such questions inform these essays, which strive to be true to the essential spirit of the works they discuss and to interrogate, as sympathetically as possible, the imagination of writers who negotiate the unstable relationships between society and the individual, art and ideas.
