A Show of Heads

Carlos Fuentes

  • I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated by Helen Lane
    Faber, 433 pp, £9.95, March 1987, ISBN 5 7114 6261 X

In the autumn of 1967 in London, I coincided with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson’s masterly portraits of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America. An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward, demanding incarnation: the Latin American dictators.

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