At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay | 
 enlarge | Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 507523
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1400041767
Dewey Decimal Number: 918.920473
EAN: 9781400041763
ASIN: 1400041767
Publication Date: January 6, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay–South America's darkly fabled, little-known “island surrounded by land.”
Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book–equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide–breaches the boundaries of this isolated land,” and illuminates a little-understood place and its people.
It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States. The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the “green hell” covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists–more or very-much-less peacefully–with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis.
Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 To be taken with a big pinch of salt October 9, 2008
The author has wittily written a sensational picture of Paraguay past and present where he freely mixes his own observations, rumours presented as true facts, and outright fabrications.
The result is funny and pleasant to read, but only those who live on the spot will know what is reliable description, and what should be read as fiction.
 Surrealistic travelogue September 16, 2008
Supremely surrealistic travelogue and history of Paraguay in a rambling personalistic and impressionistic style. Gimlette is an Englishman who was drawn to spend extended visits in Paraguay, traveling among and learning about the many disparate cultural and ethnic and linguistic factions of a single strong country torn apart by strange and unfathomable fables and historic events.
The nation became the gathering ground for misguided immigrants such as Mennonites escaping Russian pogroms and Germans spreading Fatherland rhetoric. Despite the bibliography, Gimlette's stories seem to border on fantasy.
 Few Inflatable Pigs, but a Lot of Paraguayan History August 1, 2008
The inflatable pigs seem to have been some sort of countrywide Paraguayan fad during one of the author's visits. They occupy more space on the cover than in the text, and I don't recall any mention of them being present at any of the burial sites he mentions. Like Argentina, cemeteries in Asuncion seem to be quite unique. I am a Spanish professor, and have always wanted to visit all of Latin America. I was intending to visit Bolivia, but that seemed to require not just a visa, but a full-blown itinerary of a three week trip in a place where landslides, strikes and other incidents make planning rather difficult. It is also a fact that in Latin America as a rule, the hotels that book reservations tend to charge about five times more than those that don't have a website or any way of booking a reservation. So I got a visa for Paraguay ($65) good for the life of my passport, and I will be leaving in a week or so. Mr Gimlette is an English lawyer who has spent rather a lot of time in Paraguay at different intervals, and he relates his experiences with the somewhat bizarre history of Paraguay.
Unlike the Andean nations, Paraguay has a somewhat less spectacular geography. Water and rivers, not rocks and mountains have defined it. What makes it interesting to the traveler is its people and its history, and Gimlette intertwines these in a humorous narrative. The book has one map, but needs several more. Some of the pictures in the hardbound version are in color, but in the paperback, they are all black and white. There really needs to be an index.
I am planning to return with more comments when I return from my trip. There are several good trip descriptions on igoyougo.com that I found useful.
 Don't waste you money...and probably more fiction than fact? April 11, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In the introduction to this book, the author says he wasn't sure about whether he should write a fictional account of Paraguay, or just recount his travels as a way of describing the history of Paraguay. He says he chose a factual account, but I wonder...?
As other reviews have mentioned, he jumps around between his historical account of Paraguay, and his own travels there, which are frankly quite boring when you get over the authors over-the-top writing style. His style is opaque, and he simply supplies carictures of the people he describes, both historical and ones he met personally.
For example, a 19th-century president of Paraguay who was apparently obese was presented by Gimlette as someone who was about to physically explode, and you get various takes on that metaphor everytime he is referred to in the text. And likewise for all the other people described; any character flaw or physical feature that is notable is magnified by Gimlette until essentially everyone (except the British) are just cartoon characters.
How much of all of this is true is debatable. The author likes to make gratuitous anti-American remarks (and in fact, he actually makes gratuitous anti-every-nationality remarks, except anti-British of course; they are the only nationality with any admirable traits in this book).
As an example, I checked the comment he recounts a statement made by an unnamed American (pg. 85) about a recent "American Ambassador" (again unnamed) being a political appointee who was really a supermarket tycoon, and just bought the job by way of political contribution. This didn't ring true as Paraguay isn't the kind of place that gets political appointees as Ambassadors. I actually WikiGoogled all of the US Ambassadors to Paraguay from the present back through the Eisenhower Administration and found that all were career foreign service, or had some government experience... no supermarket tycoons to be found. I guess Gimlette just wanted to take a shot at the US, or at least let the British system look better some how. How much else of this book is true, and how much made up?
Forever Enigmatic - Paraguay Revisited March 25, 2008
If you have any interest in political science, history, geography, romance and how the human mind works, this book is for you. John Gimlette weaves a tale which if you didn't know it were true, you would have to say that he has a wonderfully imaginative mind. This is a tale of a country gone wrong, not once but multiple times, thru the wiles of individuals, governments, the Catholic Church and all to the detriment of the indigenous peoples of Paraguay and their land. This is a wonderful companion book to Lily Tuck's "The News From Paraguay." It never ceases to amaze me how individuals such as Francisco Solano and their like are able to claw their way to the pinnacle of power only to destroy everything and everyone around them.
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