At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig - John Gimlette

Here's a question for you, one which would sit well in a pub-quiz were it not for its horrendously macabre nature: "which country has lost the highest proportion of its population to a single war?". I imagine many people's thoughts would stray towards Russia or Poland whose armies were decimated by German tanks in the Second World War. Perhaps others would nominate one of the many African nations that have been in a state of almost permanent warfare since independence. Few, I imagine, would choose Paraguay, which can in fact claim this unenviable record.

In the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay, in taking on the combined forces of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina (on paper it never looked good) lost up to 90% of its male population. (According to John Gimlette, "Of an original population of 1,300,000, only 221,079 survived [the War of the Triple Alliance]. Of these, only 29,746 were men. Nine out of every ten men had perished.") The war is widely seen as the bloodiest in the history of the Americas, yet like most of the events that emanate from this part of the world, it is little known in Europe. If Africa, after years of neglect, has now become the cause celebre amongst well-meaning philanthropists and soul-searching superstars, Latin America is truly the forgotten continent, at least to British-educated minds such as mine. Brazil and Argentina are great footballing nations and Colombia produces a great deal of cocaine; across the UK these are probably the only universally known truths. Latin American stories are rare in our newspapers and its history non-existent in our school books. Naturally, the continent receives more attention in Spain and Portugal, whose historical and cultural influence on the region is pronouncedly greater, but it is fair to say that the history and politics of Latin America falls below the radar of most of Europe's attention. And while Latin America may receive significantly less media focus than, say, the Middle East or the Indian sub-continent, it is also fair to say that within the region certain countries remain shrouded in far more obscurity than others. Perhaps none more so than Paraguay, the little known landlocked nation in central South America, whose name is probably only familiar to many through its appearance against England in two World Cups in the last 25 years.

John Gimlette's "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig" is an attempt to illuminate this small patch of land sandwiched between Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. It is a colourful, well-written, vague and troubling combination of history and travelogue. Most reviewers appear to have enjoyed it thoroughly, while adding the disclaimer that it should not be approached as a work of exhaustive historical depth. In various online reviews of the book, words such as "entertaining", "hilarious" and "exuberant" juxtapose regularly with "maddening"and "infuriating" and they are not wrong. Gimlette's book frustrates and pleases in equal measure. In many ways it is extraordinarily informative, surveying 500 years of Paraguayan history and detailing each corner of its land. In other ways it is unfathomably short on detail. There is only one extremely sketchy map and no index at all, an unforgivable omission given the regularity with which the author introduces and reintroduces characters from Paraguayan history, in no particular order, throughout the book. Gimlette devotes a great swath of the book to the aforementioned War of the Triple Alliance and his portrayal of the deranged Paraguayan president, Francisco Solano Lopez, (a man whose propensity to send tens of thousands of his own troops to their death provides us with a grim foreshadowing of the Europeans generals of the First World War) is graphic, illuminative and terrifying. Yet, he fails to tell us how the war started; "The immediate causes of the war were obscure", but once the four nations had "committed several hundred thousand men to the meat-grinder, they didn't seem to matter much anyway" is his unsatisfactory conclusion.

Gimlette punctuates his historical narrative with the story of his own travels accoss the country. He visits an endless array of settlements and colonies where descendants of English, Irish, Australian, Japanese and, in particular, Germans settlers cut incongruous figures, attempting to maintain the traditions of their homeland in isolated, arid pockets of desert farmland. Some of it is illuminating, a lot of it is quite dull and you'd be forgiven for thinking once you've met one lunatic settler community in Paraguay you've met them all. As for the title of the novel, I still have no idea to what it refers. This may be testament to my poor reading skills but I think it more likely a reflection of the author's extremely scattershot writing style, where clear references and unequivocal detail are hard to come by. That said, it is for the most part an entertaining, jovial read and, in all honesty, I doubt there are many other ways, in this Eurocentric literary world, to get a book on Paraguay published.