Son of Man

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.

Miguel Vera

Itapé, in the Guairá

Chapter 1

The novel opens in this heartland village, seen through a boy who grows up to be Miguel Vera. Its memory turns on a self-taught wood-carver who withdraws to the hills with leprosy and carves a figure of Christ that the villagers come to venerate, against the wishes of the priest. Itapé is a real mission town founded in the seventeenth century by the Tebicuary-mí river.

Chapter 1

explicit Roa Bastos names Itapé, a real town in the Guairá department; the specific hilltop where the wood-carver's Christ is set is not identified, so this marks the town centre.

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