Bookatlas
1917–2005Latin America
Portrait of Augusto Roa Bastos

Augusto Roa Bastos

Paraguay

Dense, self-annotating, and polyglot: a tyrant's monologue interrupted by its own forged footnotes, power performing its authority even as it unravels.

Roa Bastos fought as a teenager in the Chaco War against Bolivia, an experience that scarred his early fiction, before political opposition to Paraguay's governments forced him into exile in Argentina in 1947 and, after a later expulsion by that country's own dictatorship, to France, where he taught Guaraní and Latin American literature at the University of Toulouse.

I, the Supreme (1974) took eight years to write and reconstructs Paraguay's real nineteenth-century dictator-for-life, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, through a fractured 'perpetual circular' of dictation, forged documents, and marginal notes, its dense wordplay drawing on both Spanish and his native Guaraní to build one of the dictator novel's most demanding monuments.

Stripped of Paraguayan citizenship by the Stroessner regime for the novel's implicit attack on absolute power, he did not return permanently until democracy arrived in 1989, and he won the Cervantes Prize in 1989 before dying in Asunción in 2005.

The Latin American Boom

Lines of influence

Miguel Ángel Asturias
Augusto Roa Bastos

No descendants recorded, yet.

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1960
    Cover of Son of Man
    Son of Man
    Lvl 7historical fiction
  2. 1974
    Cover of I, the Supreme
    I, the Supreme
    Lvl 9historical fiction

Meanwhile, elsewhere

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