John Gimlette and I both won this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (awarded for unconventional travel writing) and we both got book deals as a result. Winning the prize changed my life and perhaps it changed Gimlette’s, too. We should toast The Spectator regularly for our good luck.
I wrote about the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and found them to be sophisticated, intellectual, vain and angry, spluttering with rage in shop queues. Gimlette has written about Paraguayans, who, he says, are surprisingly lacking in anger. They aren’t vain, sophisticated or intellectual, nor do they seem to have any unifying national characteristics.
This is partly because the population is sparsely distributed over an unforgiving terrain, including jungle and desert, and partly because Paraguayans have such diverse origins. People who can’t fit in anywhere else often pitch up in Paraguay. The mix includes anabaptist Mennonites, anarchist Australians and fugitive Nazis, as well as Japanese, Italian and Austrian communities. There are Indians still living by the bow and arrow in the jungle, and others who have to be dissuaded from eating their enemies.
Gluttony, indeed, is a theme in this book. Did you know that Paraguay is the world’s greatest importer of Scotch whisky? Apart from having revolting table manners, many of the people Gimlette meets are swilling in booze. Perhaps the alcohol stops them from getting angry.
With his fatal penchant for greasy food, Francisco Lopez was perhaps the country’s most revolting glutton and nastiest tyrant; he threatened even his mother with execution. Three years into his reign Lopez got Paraguay into a war with Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina.
The War of the Triple Alliance (1865-70) was one of the bloodiest and most futile confrontations mankind has ever known.
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