I the Supreme     by Augusto Roa Roa Bastos, Translated by Helen Lane Original title: Yo el Supremo Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: June 15, 2000 Format: Paperback, 433 pages ISBN: 1564782476 List Price: $13.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme, a book that draws on and r eimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814. By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I the Supreme is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power—over men, over events, over language itself.

"An elaborate and erudite opus saturated in the verbal bravura of classic modernism."—John Updike, New Yorker

"Augusto Roa Bastos is himself a supreme find, maybe the most complex and brilliant Latin American novelist of all. . . . What a glory of echoing voices this Paraguayan portmanteau is, more Joycean than Cortazar's Hopscotch, every bit as volcanic and visionary as Lezama Lima's Paradiso or Osman Lins's Avalovara. . . . I the Supreme is a work of graceful, voluminous genius, an Everest of fiction."—Paul West, Washington Post Book World

"The most magnificent work, most magnificently translated, to come from Spanish into English in almost a quarter of a century. . . . Sort of a political As I Lay Dying by way of Tristram Shandy. Every textua l fold is pleated by sumptuous wordplay; arcane, absurd, and (mostly) accurate annotation and quotation; as well as fact so much stranger than fiction that nobody knows what evil lurks in the mind of what possible man."—Ronald Christ, Commonweal

"A richly textured, brilliant book—an impressive portrait, not only of El Supremo, but of a whole colonial society in the throes of learning how to swim, or how best to drown, in the seas of national independence. . . . I the Supreme is one of the milestones of the Latin American novel."—Carlos Fuentes, New York Times Book Review

"Now that a superb English translation of this dauntingly complex work is at last available, readers in this country will be in a position to see for themselves why Latin American criti cs have been moved to invoke the names of Joyce and Musil, Cervantes and Rabelais to describe the breadth and ambition of I the Supreme."—New Republican

"These passages reverberate with a fierce surrealism—peopled with dwarves, women warriors and clairv oyant animals; studded with Borgesian images of mirrors and labyrinths, mystical eggs and blankets made of batskin, and embroidered with subsidiary tales about madness, death, and humiliation. . . . A prodigious meditation not only on history and power, b ut also on the nature of language itself."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"A text of a verbal density that recalls the later James Joyce, a web of intertextual reference never seen in modern Spanish outside of Borges, Roa Bastos' novel has challenged an d fascinated thousands of readers around the world. . . . A highly serious yet comic novel."—Los Angeles Times

"The novel's true achievement is one of tone and voice. The language is a triumph almost as much for the translator as for the author: ebulliently resourceful, brilliant in its vitriol and vituperation, rabelaisian in its extravagance."— Publishers Weekly

"I the Supreme was first published in Spanish in 1974. It is a shame that we have had to wait for so long for its publication in English, for its breadth of vision and ambition make it important in any language."—New Statesman