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The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A Novel
by: Anne Enright

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780802141194
ISBN: 0802141196
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: March 03, 2004
Publisher: Grove Press
Sales Rank: 410066
Studio: Grove Press

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The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a dazzling novel from a writer of international caliber, based on the life of the nineteenth-century Irishwoman who became Paraguay's Eva Peron. Eliza Lynch met Francisco Solano López in Paris, when she was nineteen and he was in Europe to recruit engineers for the first railroad in South America. He left several months later with a pregnant Eliza beside him. Reviled by Asunción society and the family of her lover, who never married her, Eliza nevertheless had her son baptized his heir. In less than a decade, López became dictator and plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza was notorious-as both the angel of the battlefield, inspiring the troops, and the demon driving López's ambition-and when López was killed in battle, she buried him in a shallow grave dug with her own hands. Anne Enright has written a gorgeous, deeply resonant novel.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Historical fiction in Paraguay
Anne Enright, who won the Booker Prize for The Gathering has fictionalized the life of Eliza Lynch, a nineteenth century Irish woman, who by way of the role of Parisian courtesan, becomes the lover of the emergent political leader of Paraguay. Its chapters are a mix of different narrators, usually Lynch or the medical doctor Stewart, and time is not represented chronologically. Nevertheless there are some very raw scenes exposed on the Rio Parana, in Lynch's early life, and in various villages in Paraguay during conflict with the Brazilians and Argentinians. It seems that none of the characters are lionized, nor are they truly evil; and the author seems to surprise the reader by controverting this or that judgment about a particular character. The vivid picture Enright paints is full of colorful contrasts of this woman.

Rating:

- History in the remaking
After reading "The Gathering," I ordered three other books by the astonishingly gifted Anne Enright, who knows all about women. One of these was "The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch." Her sometime protagonist, Eliza Lynch, a "fallen" woman who knows a good thing when she sees it, falls stone in love with a customer slated to become the next ruler of Paraguay. The first sentence of the book verges on porn, but it is one of Enright's many talents that she can mix the crude with the romantic and maintain a high level of curiosity. She has a knack of clearly distinguishing each character while not choosing sides; that is, the reader sees all the human, and in some cases inhuman, flaws in the souls that people her books. Her style may be found "jumpy" by some, as she creates flashbacks and flash forwards, and speaks in various voices, but stay with it and you'll be rewarded by mysteries solved, history revealed and enough red ... Read More

Rating:

- The type of novel that gives bad novelists, a bad name
This is a work that has neither style nor substance. The first eleven pages in which Enright gives a supposed blow-by-blow account of "Eliza's" lovemaking with Lopez is obviously meant to titillate and arrest the reader's senses. It fails miserably. I was nauseated.
This severely disjointed narrative in no way mirrors the real Elisa. I have in my library over thirty books that deal with Elisa Lynch including many by contemporaries who knew her well. None of these accounts, even those written by her most ardent critics, would ever portray Elisa as the cheap tart that Enright serves up to us.
This book can at best be described as a hastily drafted piece of sensationalist Pulp Fiction. At worst it is a malicious attempt to defame (albeit through allegory) a most cultured and enigmatic heroine who survived some of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century (The Irish Famine, The Bloody Algerian Campaign, ... Read More

Rating:

- Maligned figure, well-written book
I had read a recent(and somewhat misogynist)biography of this woman, the Irish courtesan Eliza Lynch, before starting this book. The author of this novel, Anne Enright, seems to have her history right: Lynch met the Paraguayan dictator Lopez in Paris and became pregnant by him before returning with him to Paraguay. There, she was reviled by high and low, probably because she was considered shameless (she did not hide her relationship with Lopez), tried to bring Parisian "culture" to this backwater, helped herself to the country's wealth (it was rich in yerba maté) and encouraged Lopez in his grandiose ambitions, resulting in simultaneous war with Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina; a war that killed tens of thouands, saw the country's wealth destroyed and Lopez himself lose his life. Historic sources say that Lynch not only did nothing to restrain Lopez's brutality, but even added to it by seeking revenge against those among ... Read More

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