The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Hardcover)

History and fiction have long been set up in opposition to one another—the one being characterized by truthfulness and objectivity, the other by imagination and invention. Of the two oppositional terms, fiction has often been deemed the less rigourous genre, tainted by falsehood. Yet, as decades of post-structural theory have suggested, historical objectivity is a notoriously elusive entity, and the question of how history is produced, indeed the whole concept of "history," is a vexed one. What passes for history has often been evidence generated by the established opinion of the age under consideration. On the other hand, fiction is not the site of falsehood, but a way of knowing—the place where methods of representation and signification, and subjectivity itself are examined. Consequently, fiction always returns, like a ghost, to haunt history.
Such considerations about the uneasy balance between history and fiction are clearly in the minds of this recent writer of the historical novel, since she addresses the problem of combining history and fiction; the words "facts" and "truth" jingle repetitively through the notes to her readers.
Anne Enright acknowledges two previous biographers of Eliza Lynch, the Irish-born prostitute who became the mistress of the Paraguayan dictator, Francisco Solano Lopez. She dismisses the other biographers, alleging that the English-speaking ones treat Eliza Lynch with "all kinds of sneering excess." However, she says that certain facts do exist and around these she has built her "scarcely less fictional" account. Designating it a novel, she says "It is Not True."
Enright's method, in describing a courtesan who, like Madame de Pompadour, escapes the fate of the fallen woman and succeeds brilliantly, is to cast over her readers the same kind of seductive spell that Eliza exerted on her admirers. Enright is a prose stylist, after the manner of Angela Carter, and her sensuous and sinuous prose matches her subject's voluptuousness. She savours words with the same pleasure that Eliza Lynch derives from handling the sumptuous fabrics that make up her gowns, the exotic flowers she sets about her boudoir, the fruits and wines she offers at her table. The effect is to create a dreamy somnolence, just as Eliza lulls her guests into losing their will-power and simply surrendering to her charms. After the death of her lover and protector, she even charms her captor so that he allows her to escape and return to Europe.
The following is a description of Eliza making an appearance at the national Paraguayan theater whose construction she has arranged:

"Her dress, it seems, is spun gold. Her underskirts are lapis lazuli, the colour of the night sky when it glows. Five diamond clusters knuckle around her throat, and a deep sapphire pendant hangs over the bodice, so low that, when she sits, it nestles in her lap. So much money. . .the crowd watches rapt as she picks up the sapphire and opens it. What can be inside? It is the very nexus, as though the entire theatre had been pulled into the world, like the finest shawl, through its pure blue doors. She glances inside—a figuring look. It is a watch, impossibly small. What use is the hour to anyone here, or the minute? Eliza leaves it carelessly open, hinged like an oyster on the blue-gold bed of her skirts, and Time spreads through the theatre, expensive and minutely ticking. Time for the interval to end. Time for the play to recommence. Time for the battle scene."

This is Enright's treatment of what the Victorians, at the height of the historical novel's prestige, called "the woman question." It is a question crucial to any examination of a historical process that has been characterized by the exclusion of women.
Enright contrives in her own way to repair that omission; she takes events that have previously been the province of soldiers, generals, politicians, and explorers—the Paraguayan war—and recasts them, making a woman the central character. Paradoxically, the woman is fitted for that centrality precisely by her eccentricity, that is by her refusal to conform to the norms of her society, and her resistance to the role of wife and mother.
The female character modifies, manipulates, or flouts the traditional female role in her own original way. Thus, Eliza Lynch succeeds by raising the decorative and seductive arts to such a flamboyant level that she becomes a legend in her own time.
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Another Eva? Whitbread finalist Enright reimagines the life of Eliza Lynch, the 19th-century Irishwoman who became mistress to Paraguayan dictator Solano Lopez.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.