A Very Good Read
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A book to keep going as long as you can. When you open the pages you are in a hot air balloon, dipping down to the detail and smoothly up again to the wider view. Longings and expectations and disappointments and maturing wisdom are woven into the heat, the smells, the physical sensations, the sense of place and time, of the bustling South American setting framed by the cool logic of Scotland, the point of reference of one of the characters. Very good indeed.
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The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch:
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This is a work that has neither style nor substance. The first eleven pages in which Enright gives a supposed blow-by-blow account of "Eliza's" lovemaking with Lopez is obviously meant to titillate and arrest the reader's senses. It fails miserably. I was nauseated.
This severely disjointed narrative in no way mirrors the real Elisa. I have in my library over thirty books that deal with Elisa Lynch including many by contemporaries who knew her well. None of these accounts, even those written by her most ardent critics, would ever portray Elisa as the cheap tart that Enright serves up to us.
This book can at best be described as a hastily drafted piece of sensationalist Pulp Fiction. At worst it is a malicious attempt to defame (albeit through allegory) a most cultured and enigmatic heroine who survived some of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century (The Irish Famine, The Bloody Algerian Campaign, and finally the War of the Triple Alliance in which over 90% of the male population of Paraguay her adopted country perished) and yet, even in her darkest hour she was magnificent. This is a woman who stopped the entire Brazilian Army in its murderous campaign to permanently annihilate the Paraguan race, by the simple act of burying the mutilated bodies of her eldest son and her Life companion Solano Lopez with her bare hands in the raw red earth of Cerro Cora, while that same Army watched from a distance in silence and awe.
The real story of Elisa Lynch and Solano Lopez is a Love story, full of courage, bravery and loyalty. It's breadth and scope cannot be sensed within the mangled historical inaccuracies and most shameful abuse of the truth contained in this rather trashy piece of verbiage, which to quote Enright in her acknowledgements section " It is around these facts that this (scarcely less than fictional) account has been built.
Based on this offering I can only conclude that this is the type of novel that gives bad novelists, a bad name.
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Great stuff from young writer!
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Having read Anne Enright's previous novel I was surprised to see the new turn which this sometime puzzling fictive creator has taken. Previous work included a lateral and bizarre comic look at the repressed Catholicism of her youth. It was a prose that was always refreshing but occasionally served only to reinforce the clichés it tried to oust. Anne Enright's imagination has voyaged far in the last four years since "What Are You Like?". Across the Atlantic Ocean in fact and up the Parana river to Paraguay in the company of her real-life heroine Eliza Lopez Lynch. Joining the rising tide of modern authors who choose to do "faction", a literary look at a historical person, we are given the story of Irish girl Eliza Lynch who journeys from Mallow to the Continent where she learns the life of a mid-19th century lady. Upon meeting Paraguay's revolutionary leader Francisco Lopez in Paris she travels as his mistress in the heart of his entourage to the dusty colonial capital of Ascuncion where she provides old-world style and culture to the macho new state of Parguay. Inevitable ruffling feathers, the uncrowned princess becomes both loathed and admired as the fledgling republic under Lopez begins to assert its weight bringing an increasingly unstable future. Crucial to the narrative is the Scottish Doctor Stewart who joins Lopez's retinue and stays for many hung-over years, chronicling Eliza's travails and falling under her spell too. Eliza's voice is heard too along with a never-trustworthy third-person narrator who flits from head to head recording the awe and pity of a rise and fall from grace. Enright's writing has matured from flashy showiness to cool sharpness; see for example the second chapter at Eliza's evocative impressions as she voyages up the Parnana; or the witty epilogue which both brings the novel both to a conclusion and begs further investigation. If the novel has one fault it is that it is not long enough! This novel is by far the best novel I've come across this year as Enright, the girl from the grey suburbs gives us a whirling torrent of "Nostromo"-meets-"Fitzcaraldo" in the muddy heart of South America.
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