At The Tomb Of The Inflatable Pig

"Colorful and meandering, by turns hilarious and horrifying, often delightful. . .and very, very odd. . . . An entirely faithful reflection of its subject." -- The New York Times Book Review [Gimlette's] account is so rich in anecdotes, so suffused in color and dialect that we are left with a sense of having somehow inhaled all this Paraguayan history and then experienced it through a nightmare or a dream. Gimlette has given us a cast of characters as vivid as any by Dickens or Waugh. -- The New York Times Gimlette knows his subject cold, and it's a subject bound to have something for everyone . . . Charming and vivid. . . crammed full of a wild cast of characters and incredible experiences. -- San Francisco Chronicle A hilarious, informed anti-travelogue . . . with generous detail grounded in the author's personal experiences, this is a travel book of the mind.-- The Boston Globe "Blends travelogue, history and flights of descriptive whimsy to highly tonic effect. . . . For all his mastery of Paraguayan history, it's Gimlette's extravagant prose and unhinged enthusiasm that make the book. . . . You couldn't ask for a more entertaining guide." -- The Seattle Times "Hilarious. . . . What keeps you reading about Paraguay, maybe in spite of yourself, is Gimlette's marvelous wit and eye for character." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Reading the book is like watching a Komodo dragon eat a tethered goat. Paraguay, as Gimlette portrays it, is . . . completely bizarre. . . . Conquistadores and Nazis, whores and cannibals, all of them rather awful, all of them splendidly rendered. . . . Graham Greene would have approved. -- National Geographic Adventure A glorious travel book . . . in which the country's craziness is portrayed with humor, insight and considerable deftness of touch. . . . As a historian of the absurd [Gimlette] is superlative. -- The Sunday Times (London) "A wildly entertaining read: a raucous blend of history, travelogue, and guide." -- Conde Nast Traveler " At The Tomb of the Inflatable Pig should be ranked among the very best explorations of its kind: at once a history and a guide to one of the least hospitable nations on earth." -- The Washington Times "Irreverent and rambunctious. . . . [A] superior travel book." -- Foreign Affairs An extraordinary book, part history, part travelogue . . . so vivid that nobody reading it is ever likely to forget the country. . . . A book that sheds fascinating light on a forgotten corner of Latin America' -- The Daily Telegraph (London) A richly detailed catalog of oddities and horrors, the kind of eccentricities that flourish in isolation. . . . [Gimlette] spills Paraguay's cruelest, most shameful secrets, but his admiration for the forlorn middle country is real on every page. -- Outside "Howlingly entertaining. . . . There [is] no resisting Gimlette's rollicking account." -- San Diego Union-Tribune "A truly wonderful exploration of one of the world's most captivating countries ... Brilliant." -- Sunday Express "[A] wonderful, wacky book. . . . Filled with the offbeat and the bizarre. Gimlette's narrative attempts to flesh out a country that is as difficult to define as nailing Jell-O to a wall. Vivid, riotous, fascinating and never dull, his book is wildly entertaining." -- The Tucson Citizen "Compelling. . . . Blackly comical. . . . Spicy, exuberant prose." -- Mail on Sunday (London) "Eccentric and richly descriptive. . . . The best travel writers are those with both a sense of history and a sense of humor, and Gimlette qualifies on both counts." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch [Gimlette] has a firm gra Informationen zum Autor John Gimlette Klappentext Haven to Nazis, smugglers' paradise, home to some of t...

Auteur

John Gimlette

Texte du rabat

Haven to Nazis, smugglers' paradise, home to some of the earth's oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer's sang-froid, a historian's erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror and-yes-charm of South America's obscure and remote "island surrounded by land.”

He takes readers from genteel drawing rooms in Asuncion-where ladies still gossip about the nineteenth-century Irish adventuress who became Paraguay's Empress to the "Green Hell” of the Chaco, a vast, inhospitable tract populated by aging Mennonites and discouraged Indians. Replete with eccentrics and scoundrels, ecologically minded cannibals and utopians from every corner of the earth, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a madly entertaining book.

Résumé
Haven to Nazis, smugglers’ paradise, home to some of the earth’s oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer’s sang-froid, a historian’s erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror and–yes–charm of South America’s obscure and remote “island surrounded by land.”

He takes readers from genteel drawing rooms in Asuncion–where ladies still gossip about the nineteenth-century Irish adventuress who became Paraguay’s Empress to the “Green Hell” of the Chaco, a vast, inhospitable tract populated by aging Mennonites and discouraged Indians. Replete with eccentrics and scoundrels, ecologically minded cannibals and utopians from every corner of the earth, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig **is a madly entertaining book.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1

My hostess was studying me with renewed interest.

"Did you say," she said slowly, "that he cut the child's hands off with a blowtorch?"

"Well, yes." I fidgeted. "Doesn't anyone remember?"

Down the table everyone shook their head, except the thief.

"I remember it," he said.

Attention swivelled in his direction. The thief was pouring more wine into his Coca-Cola. It was rumoured he'd skinned his own bank and almost got away with it. Overnight, they said, his eyes had turned black like a panda's, and his Dalmatians had run away.

"Didn't they make a film," he piped, "about The Blowtorch Case? With Antoni Opkins and those moths. That was here, wasn't it, Mónica? That was Paraguay?"

There was dissension from the silverware and glass.

The hostess was examining me again. "When did you hear these things, John?"

"When I first came here. About twenty years ago."

Ah, they all said, twenty years ago. Things were different then.

2

Throughout the summer of 1982, Asunción had been gripped by a good murder.

The body of the boy, fourteen years old and horribly mutilated by the blowtorch, had been discovered in a wealthy suburb. The details of the story were happily never very clear and the press had shown a maddening indifference to the whole affair, doubtless on the General's instructions. Perhaps his German priggishness had got the better of him or, more likely, he didn't want his Paraguayans to speculate on the possibility that his police did not have eyes and ears in every home. Starved of details by their caudillo, the citizens drank up the trickle of gossip that collected downtown, and suffocated by heat, they made themselves giddy with fantastical tales, each more grotesque than the last.

"They say he's someone in the government-a sadist," I was told by a friend, Reynaldo Gosling. Reynaldo was a few years older than me and was already a student, but he seemed to enjoy our meetings at the William Shakespeare, feasting on my most mawkish tales from England. One grandfather, he explained, had been a British railway engineer and t…