"The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch" by Anne Enright

This novel is based on the real biography of Eliza Lynch, an Irish-born Parisian courtesan who became the mistress of the heir to the dictatorship of Paraguay.

The book's prose is as verdant and multilayered as a rain forest; it has the same sense of death and decay overwhelming burgeoning life.

There is a prologue and an epilogue but the bulk of the book is written in four parts. In each of these the first half involves Eliza narrating a portion of her riverboat trip into Paraguay and the second half involves a Scottish doctor who accompanied her narrating the events of her sixteen year 'rule' in Paraguay as consort of the dictator.

I felt the pace flagged a little in the second half of the book.

Inevitably it is compared with Marquez because of the South American connection. Also, GGM specialises in great starts (eg in Chronicle of a Death Foretold) and Enright has a memorable first line: "Francisco Solano Lopez put his penis inside Eliza Lynch on a lovely spring day in Paris, in 1854." There's a hook.

Although all the chapters in the main part of the book are named after a foodstuff, one of the repeated themes is the idea that stories, biographies and lives have threads that are woven with other peopls' stories, biographies and lives. For instance:

• "They were the kind of people who attracted stories - not to mention bias, rumours, lies, rage: the whole tangle pulled into a knot by time, made Gordian by history." (A Fish)
• "Every time the threads of their lives crossed, they snarled into a knot." (Part Two: Truffles)
• "The picture of the Fates was, he thought, quite just - their big shears cutting the threads of a man's life - because what the world feels like when a man dies, even at a distance, is an unravelling." (Part Two: Truffles)

Other great moments:

• "He seems such an unbending, abstemious little man, but I sense the longing in him to give in and live as other people might." (Part One: A Melon)
• "I say there is no point in being rich if you do not know what money is. ... He says that if you know what money is, then you are not rich." (Part One: A Melon)
• "Asuncion ... is made, as every other town is made, of casual encounters and minor conspiracies; of friendliness to strangers and small, ancient irritations between friends.  ... it is made, as every other town is made, out of talk." (Part One: A Melon)
• "Railway lines snaked out into the countryside, the rails slapped down one after the other; gathering speed, like a woman who knits faster to finish before she runs out of wool." (Part One, Asparagus)
• "The hat brims, he says, are all that is left of Francia, the first Dictator, who required the entire country to wear hats so they could be doffed when he passed. Over the years, the hats fell apart, but the brims remain. It is a way of telling the people they are governed." (Part Three: Champagne)
• "Everyone in Voltaire has a buttock lopped off and it is always the one on the left. At least the women do. Not one of them left double by the end." (Part Three: Champagne)

January 2020; 230 pages