I, the Supreme

Augusto Roa Bastos · 1974 CE · Novel · Latin American · Contemporary

A forged decree nailed to a cathedral door in Asunción orders the Perpetual Dictator's corpse beheaded and his servants shot, and Paraguay's Rodríguez de Francia sets his secretary Policarpo Patiño to find the forger while dictating his own account of how the nation was made. What accumulates is a mass of competing paper — the dictation, a private notebook, marginal scrawls, and a compiler who footnotes the archives back against him. Roa Bastos wrote it in Argentine exile, and it stands with Carpentier and García Márquez at the head of the dictator-novel line.

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