Description

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 Lóoacute;pez 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.