The historical novel The News From Paraguay finds its epic story in an important political crossroads for Paraguay … Like a slowly opening fan whose slats reveal themselves one by one, so do the many stories within The News From Paraguay. Tuck's omniscient narrator finds an interesting tale in just about every character and encounter. Each brief self-contained diversion – whether of Ella's maid having her broken arm amputated or a doctor's fatal spill after urinating in a lake – crystallizes the whole in miniature.
Lily Tuck's new novel comes close to neutralizing the emotions that drove these destructive lovers; the strongest relationship in the book is between Lynch and her horse, Mathilde, whom she addresses as ‘my darling, my dear’ … Tuck's prose is elegant, the subject well researched, yet much is missing here … The News From Paraguay gradually becomes a book of unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries.
Tuck's style in these early pages is as effective and swift as in her earlier and most successful novel, Siam. By page 30, our two unsentimental opportunists are together in South America, and Ella is pregnant. Many images are so vivid you can almost smell them … 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. Instead they stay remote and rather hard-edged, never engaging our emotions. The episodic style achieves many lovely moments but becomes tiresome as it introduces and then discards dozens of people who could be memorable.
The story unfolds through Tuck's elegant narration (she flits from one character's point-of-view to another in short segments) and Ella's impassioned diaries. The author's research is impressive (Ella was a real 19th-century courtesan) but never overbearing as she explores the life of a spoiled kept woman in a foreign land, as well as the lives, both high and low, of those around her … When Paraguay finds itself at odds with neighboring countries, the novel chronicles the various tragedies and defeats with a cool and unswerving eye. Tuck's novel may not be for the faint of heart, but it is a rich and rewarding read.
The episodic tale picks up (the historical) ‘Ella’ Lynch’s story in 1854 in Paris, where she attracts the attention of Paraguayan prince regent Francisco Solano Lopez (‘Franco’), who appropriates the statuesque beauty, and brings her home, to ‘transform Paraguay into a country exactly like France.’ Tuck skillfully distributes dozens of narrative vignettes among these two impetuously matched lovers, their servants and miscellaneous acquaintances and correspondents, and numerous foreigners (‘engineers, architects, physicians, all eager to make their fortunes in this rich new world’) … A splendid realization of its rich subject, and Tuck’s best so far.
