The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

By Anne Enright

Book Overview

The novel opens in Paris, in the midst of the sexual embrace that makes Eliza Lynch the mistress of Francisco Solano L?pez, 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 fa?ade even while sleeping with a dressmaker in exchange for credit. L?pez 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 L?pez on his tour of the continent and they are now aboard the Tacuar?, having made the Atlantic crossing and navigating the Rio Parana towards Asunci?n, Paraguay, L?pez''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 Milt?n, her husband''s Guaran? 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 L?pez''s rule, his most powerful ally. When it becomes clear L?pez-"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 Asunci?n, 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 Tacuar?.Eliza becomes a scandal when they reach Paraguay. From the moment of their arrival in Asunci?n, which quickly gains the status of popular legend as Eliza''s union with L?pez becomes a national fact, she is a larger-than-life figure. L?pez''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 L?pez''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 Tacuar? to celebrate the importation of some Basque peasants who are supposed to build a new town. All the women of Asunci?n attend, but none of them will speak to her. As retaliation, she has Milt?n, 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 L?pez''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 after his father''s death, L?pez''s territorial disputes with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay lead to the War of the Triple Alliance, with tiny Paraguay at war with all tttttthree nations. Dr. Stewart, the Scottish doctor we met on the Tacuar? (and who is now married to a Paraguayan society girl named Venancia Baez, whom he has grown to intermittently love and find extremely annoying), watches as the war grows and becomes ever more bloody and farcical-it will eventually result in the deaths of what is reportedly half the national population-and L?pez''s sanity becomes more and more questionable. He envisions the war as a vast canvas of would-be heroism and actual shame and ruin. And whither L?pez, so goes Eliza. Rumors are that it is her ambition and rapaciousness more than his that spurs on the war; that she is his procuress, providing him with an endless succession of girls whose virginity she verifies herself; even that she is a cannibal whoeats the battlefield dead. Public appearances are more and more rare, but Stewart does see her in the road near a graveyard late one night, walking without her usual entourage, completely alone. He follows her for a

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802141196
• ISBN13: 9780802141194
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

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.

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 herrings left over to make you think and comjecture. Her knowledge of humanity is profound and she knows how to outline the attitudes of men toward women and of women toward themselves at their most primitive level. I finished this in one all-night session.

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 Paraguayan society (such as Lopez's family) who disdained her.Enright, writing in the third and first person (Lynch herself), brings this story to life vividly, especially in describing Lynch's first trip upriver to Asunción. Her language is colourful and evocative. The story, still sticking to history, ends with Lynch, having survived Lopez, Paraguay and the war, now in the UK and seeking damages against one of the few Europeans, a Scottish doctor named Stewart, who had remained loyal to her and her husband. History, and even this book, paints her as unsympathetic, but so seems everyone (including those who loathed her) in this sordid, brutal bit of history.