I the Supreme

New York. 1986. April 1986. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0394535359. Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 438 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration and design by Bascove. keywords: Latin America Paraguay Literature Translated World Literature. DESCRIPTION - I THE SUPREME is a book that draws on and re-imagines the career of the man who was ‘elected' Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814. When we meet Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia he is in his last days, after almost thirty years of absolute rule. Never married, having disavowed his own family and whatever friends he once had, he has as his only companion his longtime secretary, Policarpo Patiño. And it is to this much-abused (and possibly treacherous) servant that Francia pours out his deathbed ruminations: about his education at a monastery in Spain (and his expulsion therefrom), about his rivalries with his fellow ‘liberators' Bolivar and San Martin and his uneasy alliances with his Argentine neighbors, about the many-ton meteorite he had chained to his desk as punishment for being a runaway deserter from the cosmos. Roa Bastos counterpoints this ongoing conversation between master and servant by using various devices that enhance (even as they complicate) our vision of Francia: extracts from Francia's private notebook; a running commentary, the official version of the dictator's acts and thoughts, from Patiño's ‘perpetual circular'; and impeccably verifiable footnotes taken from more than 20,000 documents, supplied by an unidentified ‘compiler.' The effect of these shifting, contradictory perspectives is to reveal two Francias, one the intriguingly cunning, minor-league Machiavellian ‘I,' and the other the eerily powerful ‘Supreme,' an almost supernatural being that even Francia himself must refer to in the third person. By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I THE SUPREME is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power-over men, over events, over language itself. inventory #2008 Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket.