The Paraguayan way

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.