Product Description

Beautiful Irishwoman Eliza Lynch became briefly, in the 1860s, the richest woman in the world. The book opens in Paris with Eliza in bed with Francisco Solano Lopez - heir to the untold wealth of Paraguay. The fruit of their congress will be extraordinary, and will send her across the Atlantic on the regal voyage to claim her glorious future in Ascuncion. With the lavish imaginative richness of Marquez and the crazed panoramic sweep of Herzog, "The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch" is a bold and brilliantly achieved novel about sex, beauty and corruption and the end of the old world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281931 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
'a luscious read' Sunday Independent

About the Author
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? - shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the Encore Award - and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004. The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize 2007.

Customer Reviews

Great stuff from young writer!
Having read Anne Enright's previous novel I was surprised to see the new turn which this sometime puzzling fictive creator has taken. Previous work included a lateral and bizarre comic look at the repressed Catholicism of her youth. It was a prose that was always refreshing but occasionally served only to reinforce the clichés it tried to oust.

Anne Enright's imagination has voyaged far in the last four years since "What Are You Like?". Across the Atlantic Ocean in fact and up the Parana river to Paraguay in the company of her real-life heroine Eliza Lopez Lynch. Joining the rising tide of modern authors who choose to do "faction", a literary look at a historical person, we are given the story of Irish girl Eliza Lynch who journeys from Mallow to the Continent where she learns the life of a mid-19th century lady. Upon meeting Paraguay's revolutionary leader Francisco Lopez in Paris she travels as his mistress in the heart of his entourage to the dusty colonial capital of Ascuncion where she provides old-world style and culture to the macho new state of Parguay. Inevitable ruffling feathers, the uncrowned princess becomes both loathed and admired as the fledgling republic under Lopez begins to assert its weight bringing an increasingly unstable future.

Crucial to the narrative is the Scottish Doctor Stewart who joins Lopez's retinue and stays for many hung-over years, chronicling Eliza's travails and falling under her spell too. Eliza's voice is heard too along with a never-trustworthy third-person narrator who flits from head to head recording the awe and pity of a rise and fall from grace. Enright's writing has matured from flashy showiness to cool sharpness; see for example the second chapter at Eliza's evocative impressions as she voyages up the Parnana; or the witty epilogue which both brings the novel both to a conclusion and begs further investigation. If the novel has one fault it is that it is not long enough!

This novel is by far the best novel I've come across this year as Enright, the girl from the grey suburbs gives us a whirling torrent of "Nostromo"-meets-"Fitzcaraldo" in the muddy heart of South America.

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch:
This is a work that has neither style nor substance. The first eleven pages in which Enright gives a supposed blow-by-blow account of "Eliza's" lovemaking with Lopez is obviously meant to titillate and arrest the reader's senses. It fails miserably. I was nauseated.
This severely disjointed narrative in no way mirrors the real Elisa. I have in my library over thirty books that deal with Elisa Lynch including many by contemporaries who knew her well. None of these accounts, even those written by her most ardent critics, would ever portray Elisa as the cheap tart that Enright serves up to us.
This book can at best be described as a hastily drafted piece of sensationalist Pulp Fiction. At worst it is a malicious attempt to defame (albeit through allegory) a most cultured and enigmatic heroine who survived some of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century (The Irish Famine, The Bloody Algerian Campaign, and finally the War of the Triple Alliance in which over 90% of the male population of Paraguay her adopted country perished) and yet, even in her darkest hour she was magnificent. This is a woman who stopped the entire Brazilian Army in its murderous campaign to permanently annihilate the Paraguan race, by the simple act of burying the mutilated bodies of her eldest son and her Life companion Solano Lopez with her bare hands in the raw red earth of Cerro Cora, while that same Army watched from a distance in silence and awe.
The real story of Elisa Lynch and Solano Lopez is a Love story, full of courage, bravery and loyalty. It's breadth and scope cannot be sensed within the mangled historical inaccuracies and most shameful abuse of the truth contained in this rather trashy piece of verbiage, which to quote Enright in her acknowledgements section " It is around these facts that this (scarcely less than fictional) account has been built.
Based on this offering I can only conclude that this is the type of novel that gives bad novelists, a bad name.

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.