Novel · A way to begin
I the Supreme
Yo el Supremo
Augusto Roa Bastos · 1974
Synopsis
Asunción, 1840. Doctor José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the Supreme, who has governed Paraguay for a quarter of a century, learns that a pamphlet nailed to the cathedral door imitates his decrees. He charges his secretary Policarpo Patiño with finding its handwriting in the archives, and dictates to him circulars, notes and memories; he comes to suggest that he might himself be the author of the pamphlet. His speech contradicts and corrects itself, a compiler's notes comment on it, and the text itself comes apart, burnt or illegible in places.
Context
The novel appeared in 1974 from Siglo XXI, in Buenos Aires, while its author had been living in exile in Argentina for twenty-seven years; in it he takes as his character the dictator who ruled Paraguay from 1814 until his death. The book is made of dictations, footnotes, true or apocryphal documents and commentaries that contradict one another, so that one never knows who is writing. Many have read in it a veiled attack on Stroessner. Antoine Berman translated it into French as early as 1977. It belongs to the series of Latin American dictator novels of those years.
Who it is for
Difficult: no chapters, no stable narrator, a great deal of irony. One of the summits of the Latin American novel, but not a point of entry.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the hundred best Spanish-language novels of the twentieth century; the work that earned its author the Cervantes Prize.