Compare The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

The novel opens in Paris, in the midst of the sexual embrace that makes Eliza Lynch the mistress of Francisco Solano López, the third dictator of Paraguay. She is nineteen years old but wise beyond her years-initiated into sex by a Mr. Bennett, a friend of her family's, while still at school, she has had many lovers and even been married, to an abusive Frenchman named Quatrefages from whom she escaped in north Africa to return to Paris. She is currently a society paramour who maintainsa respectable façade even while sleeping with a dressmaker in exchange for credit. López is a young comer in Paraguayan politics, the son of the current dictator, who is in Europe on a diplomatic tour and to recruit engineers and others to help on his plan to build the first railway in South America. He goes to Eliza Lynch for French lessons, but history has other plans for them. A few months later, Eliza realizes she is pregnant. Eliza accompanies López on his tour of the continent and they are now aboard the Tacuarí, having made the Atlantic crossing and navigating the Rio Parana towards Asunción, Paraguay, López's home. Hugely pregnant, Eliza swings in a hammock feeling simultaneously imperious (she drinks champagne, cooled by being dragged through the river's water on a rope; she presides over card games which mimic the high society she has left behind and gets to know the English engineer andScottish doctor her husband has hired) and helpless, completely out of her element in a tropical, buggy landscape. But Eliza is a quick study-she befriends Miltón, her husband's Guaraní Indian servant, who teaches her to starch her dresses with porridge to combat the humidity, as the locals do, and quickly begins to think about fixing up Francine, her maid, with one of the men her husband has recruited to assist in his nationalist ambitions. Eliza proves herself a formidable woman, with exactly the right combination of strength, will, resources, and the strategic ability to make allowances for the powerful that will prove her, over the course of López's rule, his most powerful ally. When it becomes clear López-"my dear friend" as Eliza calls him-wants to sleep with Francine himself, Eliza sends the girl off to him, consolidating her own power even as she betrays herself. As they arrive in Asunción, she dresses in a lilac gown that is at the cutting edge of Paris fashion, astonishing the crowd at the pier with her poise, her beauty, her blonde, physical foreignness, even as she is going into labor. Throughout the book, chapters that tell the story of the journey up the Rio Parana, written in Eliza's voice, are interspersed with chapters narrated mostly by Dr. Stewart, the Scottish physician, telling of the legend she later becomes, of the war her husband wages, and of its consequences for her and the men whose company she kept in the elegiac, innocentdays aboard the Tacuarí.Eliza becomes a scandal when they reach Paraguay. From the moment of their arrival in Asunción, which quickly gains the status of popular legend as Eliza's union with López becomes a national fact, she is a larger-than-life figure. López's family rejects her, but the strength of his will-he is a man whose ambitions may not be refused, from the quotidian desire to possess a woman, to the political desire that will shape Paraguayan history-establishes Eliza as something they will have to deal with. Her son is born, though Stewart, who was to have been her personal physician, is so horrified by her as a person that he does not attend the birth. She has the boy christened in order to make him the legitimate heir (despite his bastard origins and the existence of another son by López's previous mistress). The women of Paraguayan society shun her-she builds a beautiful Quinta (villa) where she entertains all the strategically important men, but none of the women will befriend her. She hosts a picnic on board the Tacuarí to celebrate the importation of some Basque peasants who are supposed to build a new town. All the women of Asunción attend, but none of them will speak to her. As retaliation, she has Miltón, in the role of major-domo, throw all the food overboard, and keeps the ship at anchor in the hot sun for most of the day, until the women are fainting from the heat. In an act which hastens the old López's decline and her lover's ascent to head of state, Eliza builds a gorgeous theater, modeled on the great theaters of Europe, and mounts a play written by a European actor she has imported, but based on Paraguayan national themes. It is her bid for the office, even if only symbolic, of Paraguayan First Lady. Francine, the maid, dies horribly, of a tropical illness that eats away much of her jaw and facial features-and in treating Francine, Stewart reconciles with Eliza. In 1865, three years | The | The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright, Paperback | Indigo Chapters