This feels oddly like the book Graham Greene would have written had he been Irish and female: an historical novel about Eliza Lynch (1833-186), the Irish-born Paris courtesan who went off to Paraguay in the 1850s as the mistress of Francisco Solano López, son and eventual successor of the president. Enright doesn't try to represent Lynch's complete life-story, but depicts her by focussing on her 1854 nightmarish journey up-river to Asunción in the steamship Tacuarí, when she was expecting her first child with López, and on the events surrounding the battle of Cerro Corá in 1870, when López was deposed and killed. The viewpoint alternates between Lynch herself and the alcoholic Scottish physician Stewart (what could be more Greene?).

The book does its best to rehabilitate Lynch, who has often been treated unkindly by history (to the extent that she is sometimes blamed for provoking the war). In Enright's treatment she is simply a woman who has had a hard early life and is now trying to make the best life she can for herself in the strange world she has strayed into. I'm not sure if I was completely convinced. There seems to be a lot about Lynch that Enright isn't discussing. But it's an entertaining, exotic story about an unusual historical figure I didn't know about. ( )

'A woman...is all reputation because she may not act'

Unrecognisable from Ms Enright's other works, this is written very much in the dreamlike style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The chronology is fluid: the account of Irishwoman Eliza Lynch's journey into Paraguay, in the company of her lover, Francisco Solano Lopez - son and heir to the dictator - is interspersed with other chapters from later in her career, most notably the War of the Triple Alliance, with its massive casualties.
Although parts of the narrative are in Eliza's own words, she remained quite an enigma. Was she worthy of the scorn poured upon her by the Paraguayan ladies as an 'Irish whore'? Was she as responsible as her fearsome husband (who was prone to killing his own men) for the bloodshed? Or a brave and noble woman?
A much clearer character was Doctor Stewart, physician to the family and sometime narrator.
Ms Enright notes that this is all fiction: 'this Is Not True', and I see another reviewer more knowledgable about Eliza Lynch finds fault with the novel for the spin she has put on Lynch. I would say that as someone with absolutely no prior knowledge of Paraguayan history, this work has massively stirred my interest in the subject, and I plan to read a biography of this lady sometime. ( )

very evocative, Enright kind of taps into that dreamscape that is one of the trademarks of South American writing (see Allende). Her narrative flow can be almost too discursive at times, though -- I found myself almost unsure of what kind of traumatic events had occurred, and the disordered chronology didn't help, either.

Still. Excellent. ( )

Een ierse weet in de 19e eeuw in Parijs een steenrijke revolutionair te betoveren met haar lichaam, seks en mooie kostuums en reist met hem af naar Paraguay. Magisch-realistisch verhaal, dat berust op historische feiten ( )