I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

Hardcover, 1986

Status

Available

Call number

863

Publication

Knopf (1986), Edition: 1st, 433 pages

Description

Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814.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.

User reviews

LibraryThing member GlebtheDancer

I the Supreme is incredibly dense, throwing fact after fact at the reader. After 60 pages I was completely lost, necessitating an emergency read of wikipedia and gaining a grounding in Paraguay's history. After this, it became an easier read, but not much. The entire book is presented as musings of

the dictator, a series of internal monologues about Paraguay, power and the lonelinees of command. It is, in places, incredibly well written, mixing the punning of Cabrera Infante with genuinely haunting magical realism. Both of these devices are used sparingly, and Bastos is skillful in their application. However, at 450 pages of small print, the relentless pace and unvarying structure did wear me down. Although themes do develop, there is no overall narrative to the dictator's thoughts and it became a slog in places. I read this very slowly, largely because there were many times that I couldn't face picking it up again, which is unusual for me. It was an odd experience: writing I occassionally liked a lot packaged in a book that never really got started.

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LibraryThing member thorold

Roa Bastos imagines the reflections and annotations of the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia as he nears the end of his life in 1840. In a fragmented text that purports to be composed of fragments of a circular dictated by the Supremo to his secretary, bits of his personal

notebooks, and interjections of a later editor, Roa Bastos plays around with ideas about power and language. For a quarter of a century El Supremo has used words to dominate his citizens and oppress his actual or imagined opponents, and now as his grip on power and reality fades it’s words that are coming back to bite him.

A confusing, absorbing, more than slightly mad experience, and a powerful look at what it might mean to have absolute power.

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