I the Supreme

I, The Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos is a complex, technically accomplished, creative and stylistically unique book, a classic example of the dictator novel genre that explores the nature of authoritarianism and tyranny; the mindset and self-justifications of authoritarian leaders, the way they convince themselves and sometimes even the reader that they are ultimately righteous and acting in the best interests of the people and the nation; the way dictatorial power inherently distorts the perspective of a leader by allowing them to live without confronting the way reality does not line up with their vision and agenda; the divide between the role of the leader and the person who occupies it even as they embody it; historical narratives and the ways they are used as weapons by their writers to claim power and how untrustworthy they can be, a theme Roa Bastos explores through the use of multiple texts within the text; the created and imagined nature of power and the importance of the use of language to either reinforce or destroy it; the fragility of power because of its created and imagined nature and how that drives authoritarian leaders to seek absolute power, including over history itself; the evils and brutality that leaders who see themselves as inseparable from a people and a nation can bring down on them while insisting they are acting in their name, and the history of Paraguay and the decolonization era in South America.All that being said, I will probably remember I, The Supreme best for being the book that finally revealed to me that I do not actually enjoy reading magical realism. This is a hard read, dense and deliberately unfocused and growing moreso as it goes on, playing games with time and reality and language (both in the sense of use of words and even which language it uses with Roa Bastos frequently communicating in Guarani), told largely through unreliable narrators, primarily the dictator Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia who is increasingly losing control of his mind as he approaches his death. It’s deeply invested in its own symbolism and dismissive of typical expectations of narrative. At times, I frankly found it incomprehensible. Perhaps it requires a better and more committed reader than me, but I found it a lot more engaging when Roa Bastos stuck to the real or near-real than I did when he veered into the supernatural or too deeply dove into stylistic experiments. It may be personal – I picked up this novel for insight into politics rather than a stumble through corners of the dark underground prisons of El Supremo’s mind or literary invention.That being said, beyond the opportunity for a politically engaged writer to express his frustrations with his native country and its consistent crushing under the heels of dictators and disasters, one can see why Roa Bastos found Dr. Francia worth writing about. His combination of apparently semi-sincere nationalist populism and devotion to the Paraguayan national project and the creation of a truly independent and decolonized country with his hunger for control, his megalomania, his paranoia, his micromanaging, his pettiness, his viciousness against enemies and anyone who rose high enough in his esteem to fail him and his mix of adoration and contempt for his people is deeply intriguing. It recalls simultaneously global experiences with tyranny in general; the specific sins and psychology of men like Stalin and Peron (and one could not help but be reminded at times of the rhetoric of Donald Trump, much as I prefer not to think about it); and no one at all but Karai Guazu himself.While the use of alternate texts within the text to question its own narratives and conclusions and more broadly to comment on history and historiography is perhaps the most memorable element of I, The Supreme, even more interesting to me than the dueling portrayals of history were El Supremo’s insistence on fighting that duel. He is deliberately, openly and specifically in conversation with both present and future critiques of him and his regime throughout I, The Supreme, and Roa Bastos makes it very clear why. Dr. Francia’s power is, at its heart, fundamentally insecure. It can be undercut by historians, subverted by enemies foreign and domestic, claimed by someone else (and repeatedly it is, by imposters of varying degrees of daring), and destroyed with the simple words whose impact he sneeringly dismisses. At the heart of it is that political power is no more real in its way than the talking ghost of the Robertsons’ dog or the voice from the skull he finds as a boy. It is something that only exists when the players involved agree it exists, and no matter how many of his political rivals he consigns to lightless dungeons or to isolated prison camps that apparently turn them into monsters or stone he cannot guarantee that the nation will not change its perception about his power – it cannot be absolute. This obsesses and drives him in a way I found very real and very relevant, making him determined to make his own truth. (It brought to mind the thought for me that the most effective, or perhaps only successful, dictators are the ones who manage to shape the historical narrative as it is seen by the people as an ideological tool for themselves, those who understand its value – and El Supremo seems to be one of them, no matter how much he insists otherwise.)In retrospect, I was less focused on something I perhaps should have been: the question of the failure of Gaspar de Francia’s revolution and whether or not he himself caused its failure with his own mistakes and his inability to truly love the people. This is particularly interesting in light of how much of this book discusses his rationalizations of his violence and his dictatorship (such as his belief that Paraguay is both great and weak, in need of protection from powerful foreigners; that it is the home of a truly revolutionary state that is simply still too immature for democracy; that he is the One Indispensable Man who can guide the Paraguayans, and his entirely accurate conclusion that European economic domination could reduce them to essentially vassal status) in a way that both calls attention to those of this rationalizations that are shared by other dictators and dictator wannabes, and that establishes him as the best-written kind of villain, the one where you can truly understand why they might think of themselves in their hearts as a hero.Roa Bastos was from my side research very much engaging in a critique of Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator of Paraguay who dominated the country through much of his lifetime, highlighting and attacking the cruel tactics and human rights violations that Gaspar de Francia and he shared and presumably some of their defenses of those tactics – and I suspect in subtle ways through some of the areas in which Gaspar de Francia seems reasonable, too. As Galeano argues, the isolationism pursued by Gaspar de Francia and the later Francisco Solano Lopez, while often portrayed negatively in histories written outside of Paraguay can also be seen as a courageous act against the essential re-colonization of a Latin American country by foreign capital, and there are certainly times when Roa Bastos seems more sympathetic to Gaspar de Francia in his exploration of this area of policy. This was, to my belief, not a direction shared by Stroessner. He also has El Supremo repeatedly point out that his rise to power was in fact confirmed by something that for that era could quite legitimately be considered the consent of the governed in a way that few other leaders were – again a sharp contrast with Stroessner, who came to power in a military coup.My knowledge of Paraguayan history, although I like to think pretty decent for a child of the United States, was in general a big drawback in this book. Whatever our tendency to lump Latin American writers together, this is a thoroughly Paraguayan work rather than one that primarily aims to speak for the region or universally, a book steeped in that country’s national narratives, myths, debates and past. I did enough Googling while reading to get the sense that there was a lot going on both at and under the surface that would be immediately clear (or clearer) and pointed to a Paraguayan reader, or at least a reader more familiar with the subject matter, that was completely going beyond me. Considering the obstacles this book poses stylistically already, I would advise anyone who wants to take it on to make it easier on themselves by doing more background reading on Paraguay than I did in advance.

The reader might wonder who on earth would want to know what goes on in the mind of a really horrible person, but everyone from police detectives to your average citizen ought to know how a dictator thinks, because--here's the surprise--there's a little bit of the Supreme One in all of us. For each of us, we are Supreme in our own lives; we would like our orders to be followed, or we would like to control everyone. The difference is that this dictator was given the power (by those at the top) and then used his power to either execute or imprison anyone who disagreed with him--and relatives were no exception. But, even after 25 years, the Supreme Dictator of Paraguay could not escape death; surely you'd think that the experience of one's own aging and mortality would humble some people, but not if you've made a deal with the devil, I suppose.The artistry of this novel is that it's way beyond what Irish exile James Joyce or any other writer of a monumental tome could accomplish, and now I see why: the author Augusto Roa Bastos was a native-born Paraguayan who fled to Argentina from another of those dictators. As a man in exile, Roa Bastos had the knowledge to write as he did, basing his "character" of the dictator on actual historical documents. And now that I think of it, Stendhal was also fleeing from the Austrian occupation of northern Italy which threatened to arrest him. It seems that if you live in fear of a totalitarian regime, and you are literate, you can crank out a dynamic novel--even if a somewhat difficult one, as in Yo, El Supremo.To quote at all from this novel would be to take words out of context since every phrase, every image, every sentence is connected to the one before and after--and the tone of voice binds the entire novel. The astonishing thing is that this dictator kind of snuck up on me; in the middle of a paragraph, I would suddenly think that this dictator makes sense, in fact, it would seem that for Dr. Francia, the real man on whom the novel is based, is quite rational. El Supremo makes it seem that some nations, while in their formative state, need dictatorship. Democracy would be bad for your people, if you think of your people as children, and they might be attacked by Argentina or Bolivia, for example. But it's still a mystery to me why, in certain periods of history, in certain places in the world, some nations have tyranny but others do not--or their leaders think that everything is going fine. But this novel is the most thorough, imaginative exploration of this topic that anyone is likely ever to read, and it puts a whole new spin on the topic of national security. I didn't think it possible, but because of this novel I am more aware of the use of language, the effects that a wide vocabulary can have on a person's ability to think--and, for the first time, I'm deeply aware of Paraguay.This is not an easy summer read, but I guess the past two months it have been winter in the southern hemisphere.

In what has to be a fictional note at the end of the book, the author claims that he is not such, indicating that he merely copied parts of historical documents, writings and tales, thus the real "author" of this book is history itself and not him, who he says is merely the "compiler." The work is indeed true to history; the history about José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the controversial Dictator of Paraguay between 1814-1840 who used to sign his official decrees not with his name but the sentence that is the title of this book. This is a wonderfully complex book; not easy to read. Sometimes fascinating paragraphs are unexpectedly cut with some note form the "compiler" indicating that the rest is illegible because the page is partly burned, which lets you to think that it was indeed copied from an old document; while at other times you read fascinating dialogs and monologues which you would think had to be fictional; but it is not as simple: You cannot tell truth from fiction because the truth seems fictional and the fiction tells truth. Truth that comes to you in the form of insights about the state of mind of a dictator, about absolute power, and about the soul of a country that owns its independent existence to its first dictator's determination to be its supreme ruler. It is an utterly fascinating book.

No jacket and a bit on the poor side condition wise.

Terrible quality in research and construction. Could be distilled into 50 pages. A waste of money!

Great book. Uset but in Good shape

When a novel is described as `richly textured' or `multilayered' it is sure to be difficult and I The Supreme is indeed very dense and complex. Founder of the Republic, perpetual dictator, enlightened despot, cruel tyrant, the first leader of the newly independent Paraguay in 1814 known as El Supremo stirred different emotions in different people depending on their personal experiences. He continues to do so even today and Roa Bastos's colossal imaginative reconstruction of his career written in 1974 must surely be one of the definitive meditations on the nature of power, its uses and abuses and inevitable corrosive effects on both wielder(s) and recipient(s) alike. El Supremo, inflated by hubris and consumed by paranoia, rambles and rants about his benevolence and tolerance up to his final breath. Baroque, burlesque and grotesque in turns, I The Supreme is packed with pages of footnotes, extracts, translations, extravagant and experimental use of language and numerous neologisms. I should deduct a star for the magnitude of the literary challenge but it is simply too impressive a work to do so. Nevertheless, it is recommended more to those who are familiar with, and enchanted by, magic realism than with Dan Brown.

This is predominantly the first person fictionalised account of Dr Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia y Velasco (1766-1840) the one time dictator of Paraguay from 1814 to his death. He has a scribe called Pantino (the odd reference to Sancho Panchez might suggest a certain humour to the relationship) who he chats to directly. It is a very long book being over 400 hundred pages of tight spacing and small font with frequent footnotes being almost as long with even smaller font etc i.e. not a quick read. The book is constructed with the majority of Jose's view on things but the story's `compiler' makes notes and supposed extended quotes from `perpetual circulars' and Pantino also has some things to say make up together making up about 40% of the text. There are many retrospectives and events out of sync. You would be correct in interpreting the cover stating `a richly textured...' as meaning extremely difficult to follow and understand.The tale starts with a good opening as Jose reads a note pinned to the wall denouncing his rule - investigations and recursive references to this event occur throughout the book which I think represents the perpetual insecurity of his rule. Jose rises to power whilst Buenos Aires and other local regions try to take the place over and characters like Belgano and Cavanes are his rivals and Dias de Ventura is one of his enemies. Later we meet two Scottish brothers called Robertson who are traders and biographers. He has other people whom he falls out with and punishes for basically letting him down. Towards the end he is getting old (senile?) and dies leaving his legacy.One might be tempted to, having put so much effort to get through this text, and trying to keep track of events and people (all out of sequence etc) and imbuing oneself with the detailed, complicated and realistic style to rate this book highly but I'm not. This book really is a trial (it might be more poetic etc in the original Spanish?); and after about 1/3 this book it was one of only a few which I genuinely felt like giving up on. There are some interesting quotes and scenes (e.g. a guy punished to perpetually row down the river) but these are few and far between. At the end I can't in all honesty say I understood what happened. I don't think you are likely to call this an `enjoyable read' - this dictator in others hands could have been so good, instead the impenetrable glop of the narrative becomes heavy, and yes `boring'. Joyce is difficult but ends up enjoyable, Marquez can be too magical but ends with realism - Bastos manages to be neither magical, realistic or enjoyable only difficult.Try it if you must but if you don't get it - don't bother to finish there is no reward at the end. If you're looking for an alternative Latin-American style look at my listmania for some recommendations.

Dense yet insightful read