The Eliza Lynch Story.(The Shadows of Elisa Lynch)(The Empress of South America)(The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch)(Book Review)

It's an irresistible story, better suited to grand opera than to history. An unhinged autocrat wages war on a much larger country, reducing the male population of his own Latin American nation by 90 percent. He takes for his lover a voluptuous, wealthy Irish courtesan and passes a death sentence on his own mother. No wonder so many authors have been drawn to the saga of the Paraguayan War (1865-70). The subject has spawned a massive bibliography, much of it centered on the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez and his scheming mistress, Eliza Lynch. By happy coincidence, that bibliography has just been enriched by three new volumes.

Sian Rees's "The Shadows of Elisa Lynch" (256 pages. Review) and Nigel Cawthorne's "The Empress of South America" (320 pages. Heinemann) are two very different retellings of the story. Lynch arrived in Paraguay in 1855, the latest in a long line of Irish--Alejandro O'Reilly, governor of Louisiana; Ambrosio O'Higgins, viceroy of Peru--who had come to rule Spanish America. But as Cawthorne points out, Lynch represented not Ireland nor Spain but France, where she had made her career during the Second Empire, and whose glittering court she and Lopez dreamed of taking to South America. In short order, she became South America's leading conspicuous consumer. Lopez partook in his own shopping spree, importing from Europe all kinds of railroads and warships; when he finally invaded Brazil, his Army was the largest on the continent.

Cawthorne revels in the lurid aspects of the story. In one apocryphal scene, Eliza persuades a talking statue of the Virgin Mary to give up her jewels for Paraguay (i.e., Eliza). Cawthorne reserves special venom for Lopez: "He made no effort to clean his teeth... Those that remained were unwholesome in appearance and as black as the cigar he kept permanently clenched between them. His heart was blacker."

Rees is less exuberant, yet vividly re-creates the horrors of the war as an increasingly insane Lopez turned on his own people. In one scene she describes how his henchmen tortured a traitorous commander's wife: "The men... stripped her, took away her necklace and bracelets, dragged rings from her fingers, threw her face up on the ground and lanced her, twice, for there were two traitors there." But Rees's book is undermined by errors and lacunas. Strangely, she does not mention the prototypical Latin American tyrant, Paraguay's founder Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. And she writes, for example, that the Paraguayan tricolor was created by Lopez in a pathetic imitation of ...