Summary and Reviews of The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck

Media Reviews

Boston Globe Paraguay materializes as Tuck’s characters do, imperceptibly, until the sounds, smells and colors of the country saturate the pages …a tense elegant novel.

San Francisco Chronicle Highly engaging…charming and beguiling…. Like a slowly opening fan whose slates reveal themselves one by one, so do the many stories within The News from Paraguay.

Los Angeles Times Elegant …Reading The News From Paraguay feels like looking into a crystal ball seeing pieces of a garden, storm clouds building, lives passing...

Los Angeles Times Decorous detail and vivid imagery.

Ms. magazine The world [Tuck] creates is exotic, vivid and relevant for anyone concerned about the abuses of power, corruption and generation-long consequences of devastating wars.

New York Times Book Review Tuck’s prose is elegant, the subject well researched.

Newsday Compelling…the stuff that good fiction is made of complex characters and an intricate narrative.

The New Yorker Tuck’s historical novel of nineteenth-century Paraguay is told largely through (and sometimes in the voice of) Ella Lynch, a blond, fair-skinned Irishwoman who, while a courtesan in Paris, met Francisco Solano Lopez, the son of Paraguay’s dictator. She became his mistress and, after Lopez (known as Franco) succeeded his father, she was the most powerful woman in the country. As an Irishwoman in Paraguay, Tuck’s Ella is an outsider. But so, in a way, is Franco, a megalomaniac who builds a theatre modelled on La Scala and wages a disastrous war against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Paraguay’s malarial swamps and faux-European high society are the perfect setting for Tuck’s dark wit, and her novel is quickened by such details as Ella’s pink marble palace and her son’s necklace made from the ears of enemy soldiers on a rawhide string.

The Washington Post - Joanne Omang, Tuck's style in these early pages is as effective and swift as in her earlier and most successful novel, Siam....But one keeps waiting for the moment when Ella will become an appealing human being, or when Franco will reveal the charisma he must have had, or when his sisters will emerge from their fat-slob stereotypes to become real people....Perhaps this frustrating approach is meant to evoke the disjointed nature of human experience, the measuring out of lives in coffee spoons, the inadequacy of memory, the sheer coquetry of chance and life and death, etc. If so, it is certainly just as frustrating as real life can be -- for example, when one is hoping to sit down with a vivid story and learn a little something about how to be a full human being while yet surviving during violent and turbulent times.

Kirkus Reviews Starred review. A splendid realization of its rich subject, and Tuck's best so far.

Library Journal - Beth E Anderson A gripping read, this is recommended for readers who have strong stomachs and no need for sympathetic protagonists.

Publishers Weekly Tuck's novel may not be for the faint of heart, but it is a rich and rewarding read.

Brad Hooper, Booklist This novel moves along swiftly but, unfortunately, not very deeply; characterizations seem more image than substance. Still, this is an interesting time and place, so expect requests from historical-novel lovers.