Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814. By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I the Supreme is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power--over men, over events, over language itself.
- ISBN10 0571148697
- ISBN13 9780571148691
- Publish Date 7 March 1988 (first published 9 March 1987)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 24 February 1993
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Faber & Faber
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 448
- Language English