This is a wonderful book, by a great writer. The catch is that very often it will be misunderstood, and associated with the group of fantastic south american writers, like Garcia Marquez. Instead the story is basically for real (the story of the last years of Paraguay dictator Gaspar Francia, who ruled the country from 1813 to 1840), and most of the mentioned documents are authentic, or at least plausible. Roa Bastos has played on the borderline between history and fiction, but most readers will not know this, and take for fiction what are very important and interesting historical facts, that would deserve a different approach and attention. This is the only (but rather painful) fault I find in an otherwise beautiful work.

There are three great novels about the Latin American dictator and all of them are very different. Miguel Asturias' Mr. President deals with a backwater banana republic where the president for life's presence itself is minor. What occurs instead is the lethal working out of a hideously unjust system which crushes and destroys all who resist and those who are caught in its clutches. Then there is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, an example of high modernism at its most brilliant. In sentences of increasingly serpentine length (in the end consisting of the final chapter of forty-five pages) Garcia Marquez deals with an aged dictator who has ruled for centuries and is capable of every iniquity (such as serving up a cabinet minister for his treacherous colleagues to eat) while living in a world of pretend power and real submission (he has to sell his country's sea to pay off the Americans). This book is also high modernist, but is very different. Instead of the fantastic elements of the Autumn of the Patriarch we have here the story of the founder of Paraguay, Dr. Francia. Dr. Francia consolidated his country's independence by creating a regime of isolation and absolute power. He expelled the Jesuits and set up his own Catholic Church so it would not be beholden to Rome. He was utterly ruthless and the result, according to E. Bradford Burns was an autarky that probably benefited the masses more in terms of literacy and nutrition than any other Latin American country of the time. Its fate, however, was to be crushed by the surrounding countries in the great war of 1870-73 where the male population was almost literally devastated.

No venal tinpot hack, Dr. Francia appears as a man of frightening sincerity, in an account that is of direct revelance to the fate of Castro's Cuba. I, the Supreme begins with a proclamation in which the dicators calls for the decapitation of his corpse and the lynching of all his ministers. It continues with tales of prisoners forced to live in boats travelling down the rivers of Paraguay without ever stopping. We read of Francia's dialogue with a sycophantic Vicar General ("How long did the trial of the infamous traitors to the Fatherland last? As long as it was necessary in order not to rush to judgement. They were granted every right to defend themselves. In the end every recourse was exhausted. It might be said that the case was never closed. It is still open. Not all the guilty parties were sentenced to death and executed."), who then goes on to condemn his priests for siring dozens and hundreds of illegitimate children. Like Lenin and indeed Stalin he rants against the jungle of bureaucracy that he himself has created, he outsmarts the greedy surrounding oligarchies who wish to absorb Paraguay, he reminds his civil servants not to express and exploit the Indian population. We read reports of how school children are indoctrinated to see their great leader ("The Supreme Government is very old. Older than the Lord God, that our schoolmaster...tells us about in a low voice.) The book is a masterpiece of polyphony, filled with many voices and viewpoints, combined with a richness of metaphor and incident and a complexity of moral vision that have few competitors this century. Writing for a country that has possessed only brief and shadowy vestiges of liberty, Roa Bastos deals with its pain in a way that should be required reading for all who care about democracy.

In what has to be a fictional note at the end of the book, the author claims that he is not such, indicating that he merely copied parts of historical documents, writings and tales, thus the real "author" of this book is history itself and not him, who he says is merely the "compiler." The work is indeed true to history; the history about José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the controversial Dictator of Paraguay between 1814-1840 who used to sign his official decrees not with his name but the sentence that is the title of this book. This is a wonderfully complex book; not easy to read. Sometimes fascinating paragraphs are unexpectedly cut with some note form the "compiler" indicating that the rest is illegible because the page is partly burned, which lets you to think that it was indeed copied from an old document; while at other times you read fascinating dialogs and monologues which you would think had to be fictional; but it is not as simple: You cannot tell truth from fiction because the truth seems fictional and the fiction tells truth. Truth that comes to you in the form of insights about the state of mind of a dictator, about absolute power, and about the soul of a country that owns its independent existence to its first dictator's determination to be its supreme ruler. It is an utterly fascinating book.

Roa Bastos's Hijo del hombre could easily be another depressing novel about dictatorship, a theme much common in Latin America (due to obvious reasons of course), another story about cruel soldiers and suffering non-soldiers, but, like other Latin- American novels about dictators like Asturias's Senor Presidente or Fuentes's Artemio Cruz, it is its experimentalism in form what saves him from being just a catalogue of dour facts. Though not as experimental as the author's subsequent novel, Yo, el supremo, where Bastos experiments wildly with the Spanish language to describe the mind of a Paraguayan - you've guessed right - dictator, this novel also shows some interesting formal traits, and it is a far more enjoyable novel for someone who does not speak a good Spanish (like me). The story is not told chronologically, each chapter is about a typical figure in the Paraguayan civil war, and this characters pop up here and there throughout the novel, and some scenes return represented in another angle. The Biblical symbology is also has a key importance here (the title translates Son of man), the figures are mostly representations of the Biblical archetypes, for example the good prostitute, the evil brothers, etc. and this way the main characters have a certain mystic aura around them. Also there are allusions to other Biblical motifs, like the Flood or the Crucifixion, which gives a special arcane feel to the whole story.

After reading about the military operations in the Chaco War, I wanted to know further and read contemporary literature of both beligerents. Son of a Man is much more, it is itself a brief history of the generation to be involved in that bloody war, that bled white both paraguay and bolivia's populations. Son of a Man is the story of common people, and through their lives the history of a country is knit.

From the begining to the end you can feel latin american's scents. The writer can mix history and fiction magnificently