Paraguay - the name conjures up everything most exotic and extreme in South America. It's a place of hellish jungles, dictators, fraudsters and Nazis, utopian experiments, missionaries and lurid coups. It's not a place for the timid because there isn't even a guidebook. But Paraguay, as revealed in this outstanding new book, is among the most beautiful and captivating countries in the world. The beguiling Paraguayans, despised and feared by their neighbours, are unfathomable. They adore Britain (hundreds volunteered to fight for Britain in the Falklands War), have a taste for soccer and, when the Vice-President is murdered, they call in Scotland Yard...John Gimlette has written a brilliant evocation which captures Paraguay's originality, passion, quirkiness and contradictions.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Landlocked, almost impenetrable and a long-time experimenter in tyranny, Paraguay is visited by few tourists yet becomes intimately open through this idiosyncratic travel book. Each bizarre incident on Gimlette's visits etches its contradictions, deceptions, eccentricities and extraordinary inhabitants ranging from Nazis to the stationmaster of a railway that no longer runs. One US ambassador said that in Paraguay the poor go to prison and the rich go to their clubs. Who are the rich? "Arms-dealers, drug-dealers, arbitrage manipulators and real-estate tycoons; girlfriends like ponies and mistresses like rocking-horses, a pimp, a hustler and the head of a dynasty...". A marvellously rumbustious, enjoyable and evocative debut from barrister Gimlette who won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for the travel essay which he expanded into this book.
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ISBN-13
978-0-09-179433-0 (9780091794330)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Although this is his first book, John Gimlette is already well established as a travel journalist, having won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an essay which has led to this book, and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award. He writes regularly for the Telegraph. When not deep in the jungles of Paraguay he practises as a barrister in London.
