Literary places in Asunción

Mapped

• 1974

  I the Supreme

  Augusto Roa Bastos

  Roa Bastos's dense, experimental masterpiece is the monologue of El Supremo, Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator who ruled Paraguay in absolute isolation from 1814 to 1840, dictating and raving to his secretary as he dies. The setting is his sealed capital: the government palace from which he rules by decree, the closed city of Asunción cut off from the world, the prisons of his repression, and the old colonial centre around the cathedral where his omnipresent power is felt.

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• 1960

  Son of Man

  Augusto Roa Bastos

  Roa Bastos maps the Paraguayan people across half a century, from the red-earth villages of the central heartland to the waterless scrub of the Chaco. Interlinked stories move between Itapé and its wood-carver, the railway workshops and sugar country around Sapukai, the capital Asunción, and the far western battlefields of the Chaco War against Bolivia. The map runs wide, from the Guairá hills east of the capital out across the river to the northern Chaco.

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