At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay FROM THE PUBLISHER
"A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay - South America's darkly fabled, little-known "island surrounded by land."" "Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now John Gimlette's eye-opening book - equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide - breaches the boundaries of this isolated land and illuminates a little-understood place and its people." Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating journey.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
… [Gimlette's] account is so rich in anecdotes, so suffused in color and dialect and detail that we are left with a sense of having somehow inhaled all this Paraguyan history and then experienced it through a nightmare or a dream.
Mr. Gimlette gives us a cast of characters as vivid as any by Dickens or Waugh: Aleixo Garcﾽa, a swaggering Portuguese thug who journeyed across Latin America in search of El Dorado but ended up being eaten by cannibals; the mad, gluttonous Francisco Lﾽpez, who plunged his nation into an imbecilic war and eventually paid with his life; his indomitable mistress, Eliza Alicia Lynch, who is rumored to have appeared at one battlefield dressed in white crinolines; and the famous Victorian superhero Richard Burton, who was disappointed to have missed the terrible siege of Humaitﾽ by two months.
In the end such historical personages come together with the many people Mr. Gimlette meets on his own travels to create a portrait gallery of Paraguayan history, a history so improbable that it would have been difficult to believe if the author had written it as a novel. — Michiko Kakutani
NY Times Sunday Book Review
Gimlette is a big-picture, broad-brush amateur historian, untroubled by details. But to fault him for this is to miss the point, because his book is not intended as some ponderous footnoted tome or even a conventional travelogue, but rather an emotional evocation, partial in every sense of the word, of a place the author has come to love. Graham Greene arrived in Paraguay hoping to find ''some mingling of the exotic, the dangerous and the Victorian.'' He was not disappointed. Gimlette has captured that mingling as powerfully as Greene did, and while only a few readers may feel moved to visit Paraguay after reading his book, none, I suspect, will soon forget it.
— Ben Macintyre
Publishers Weekly
Over the past 500 years, Paraguay has been invaded by successive waves of conquistadors, missionaries, Mennonites, Australian socialists, fugitive Nazis and, perhaps most improbably, Islamic extremists. "An island surrounded by land," bordered by vast deserts and impenetrable jungles, Paraguay is a country uniquely suited for those seeking to drop out of sight or, like Gimlette, find themselves. The author was 18 when he first traveled to Paraguay more than two decades ago; return visits only deepened his appreciation for the nation and its tragicomic past. Gimlette seems to have gone everywhere and talked to everyone. He boats down piranha-infested rivers, hobnobs with Anglo-Paraguayan socialites and hunts down the former hiding place of notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. Gimlette, a travel writer and lawyer in London, proves a chatty, amiable guide to local institutions like the national railway (which has no running trains) and native wildlife, like the fierce, raccoon-like coatimundis (who, Gimlette writes, "make up for their absence of pity with fistfuls of dagger-like claws"). Yet he doesn't shirk from the nastier aspects of Paraguay's bloody history. Gimlette describes in horrific detail, for example, the rape and conquest of the Guarani Indians as well as the brutally repressive regime of Don Alfredo Stroessner (whose U.S.-backed dictatorship lasted longer than any other in the Western Hemisphere). Gimlette could have used some judicious editing-the narrative drags in parts, and its scattered chronology can be confusing-but he never fails to impress with his ingenuity, sincerity and sense of humor. 16 pages of color and b&w photos, not seen by PW. (Jan. 13) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
This irreverent and rambunctious "rummage" through Paraguayan history is no political-science primer, and academics will most likely hate its verve and colorful language; Paraguayans, for their part, will probably receive the book with tired resignation. Gimlette takes up a fine old tradition of wide-eyed, gee-whiz narrative, breaching the formidable frontiers of this "island surrounded by land" that became a refuge for "Nazis, cannibals, strange sixteenth century Anabaptists, White Russians and fantastic creatures that ought long ago to have been extinct." The account borrows from Paraguay's many past chroniclers, from Captain Richard Burton to the missionary Wilfred Barbrooke Grubb, who evangelized with English vicarage teas in the "green hell" of the Gran Chaco; it also rolls out Paraguay's succession of grotesque tyrants, from Dr. Gaspar Francia — the "Supreme One" — to the more recently deposed dictator General Alfredo Stroessner — said by Graham Greene to look like the "amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian bierstube." Many such pieces of unforgettable history enliven this superior travel book, which also includes a good retelling of the Paraguayan war and perceptive observation of the contemporary scene.
Library Journal
How can one describe Paraguay? How many people actually know where Paraguay is? Whatever the answer to the second question, Gimlette, a regular contributor to Conde Nast Traveller and other journals and newspapers, does a masterly job with the first. Here we find the exploits of dictators, opportunists, and just general folk on the lam that would make Central American strongmen blush. Gimlette travels from one end of Paraguay to the other in search of Mennonites, Japanese, indigenous tribes, and the stray Nazi. A good part of the book covers the rise and fall of Francisco Lopez (1826-70) and his Irish mistress, Eliza Lynch. Lopez almost single-handedly razed his country by waging war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. In Gimlette's own words, "Francisco Solano Lopez's promise to die with his country came not a moment too soon. Had he left it any longer, there might have been no country left to die with." A fantastically written book about a neglected part of the world, this is recommended for all libraries.-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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