At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

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Introduction

Through the eyes of a British man Paraguay is pictured as a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women.

As this TP was written my points of view was the most important information source, disagreeing with the author in some of his statements.

He describes a dirty country, and in my defence it is not like that.

In relation to the title, in the cover of the book is the photo of a pink pig. It does not say why, but I suppose that it would be on sale in the market and called his attention. Or perhaps, the Inflatable Pig was a premonition of its book: Great by outside, emptiness on the inside.

AT the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

Is a book about Paraguay written by John Gimlette, an English lawyer who has come here in Paraguay for visit. But from its beginning, the book is full of errors and plagued of hatred towards Paraguay.

“Paraguay is not merely isolated, it is almost impenetrable”, why does he said that? Our country is open to travel in and out, for my personal experience, Paraguay is neither isolated nor impenetrable, and I would travel with no problem at all, if I had the means. Commerce in general terms is good here, we import as much as we export. “It has become a refuge to Nazis, cannibals, strange sixteenth-century Anabaptists, White Russians and fantastic creatures that ought long ago to have been extinct”. “The Paraguayans describe their landlocked nation as ‘South America’s Switzerland’. In truth, it is its Cinderella”. I do not know anyone who thinks that Paraguay is the ‘South America’s Switzerland’ as he mentioned. “A by-product of Paraguay’s strong kinship and oral traditions is that no one agrees on anything. History is largely a matter of opinion”, again, he is completely wrong, why he did not ask some of the good, excellent historians that this country has.

It describes the life in Paraguay of that time so excellently that it is peculiar that a man so misinformed as Gimlette that writes a book plagued of errors, has called the attention of the “elite press”, North American.

The book was published originally by Hutchinson in London, in 2002. The U.S.A. version just got out. -- This is the second book recently written by an English about Paraguay. In both, the writers did not scrimp poison.

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