Myth making - Rated 
Brfore you read this book take a long look at the picture on the cover, the title and the synopsis. If you expect an accurate guide for any excursion into Paraguay then you need to buy the most recent Lonely Planet. If on the otherhand, you want your imagination to be fired with tales of adventure and exploration then you should read this book. Carver crafts a piece of Travel Literature that comes from after dinner discussions at a Gentleman's Club, from the faded pages of Edwardian Boy's Own comics or from the Western imagination itself, where the tropics are undiscovered and exciting.
Travel narrative has a history of blurring the lines between fact and fiction, this has happened from Herodotus through to Renaissance maps with monsters and sea dragons. Our perception of developing nations comes almost exclusively from rolling news channels, charity adverts and soundbites of 'celebrities' doing their bit;I find it refreshing to read an almost colonial description of an idiosyncratic country shrouded in a cloud of myth.
Carver highlights the apparantly negative factors of modern Paraguay to provide a contrast to our own 'civilized' world. Through the characters he meets we learn more about an outsider's view of this strange tropical land. Throughout his own narrative we learn about how our own world has lost almost all of it's spontaneous spirit and freedom. If there was a blueprint for state creation in the modern era then the Paraguayans have clearly misunderstood it, or photocopied it the wrong way round. It truly is a most curious country, and to Carver's credit he captures this.
The reason I dropped a couple of stars has been covered by the other reviewers. If I had read this before travelling I probably would have avoided Paraguay, this would have been a mistake. Carver sometimes goes too far in creating excitement, this is pointless for a country like Paraguay, it is exciting enough anyway.
Apocalypse Not - Rated 
I too echo the previous reviewer. Carver makes Paraguay seem more like war-torn Congo. Was the really the same country I'd spent a month in shortly before reading this book? Indeed, was this the same Asunción I'd stayed in; taking buses freely around the city, eating in restaurants, going to football matches? Asunción needs the same sensible precautions that any visit to a third world capital requires, but Caracas, Bogota or San Salvador is isn't.
The nonsense starts even before he arrives in Paraguay, as apparantly his flight connection at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo is swarming with gun toting ranch hands. Perhaps the airport security people had that day off. Like the reviewer mentioned, the book is riddled with geografical errors. Carver tells us his bus from Encarnacion to Trinidad passes through the German settlement of Honenau, telling us of the latter he didn't get off the bus as he didn't like the look of it. Hardly surprising, as it is actually 10 km further on!
Bruce Chatwin seemed to start the trend for upper class English writers visting latin america and writing semi-fabricated travelogs, but his curiosity, research, imagination, turn of phrase and touch of Borges, allowed him to produce a masterpiece with 'In Patagonia'. Curiously, Carver's opening and closing chapters about a long lost great uncle who adventured in South America have a remarkable similarity to Chatwin's about a long lost great uncle who adventured in South America.
The first half of the book is readable enough (though the description of Concepcion is laughable) as Carver begins to go stir crazy in his five star hotel, with some touches of self-awareness from the author. The second half sadly is little more than extended political rants, as Carver expounds his paranoic, far-right, libertarian views. Neo-liberal privateer Gordon Brown is "a socialist", Europe is an overcrowded hellhole (has he ever looked down from an aeroplane and noticed the huge empty swathes?) and virtually everyone is living parsitically off the state. Judging by Carver's brief biog inside the jacket, having spent so much of his 'career' working for the BBC, so has the author.
Like many ageing English seeking the mythical mono-racial shangri-la of their 50s childhood, Carver has tried escaping his homeland for rural Spain and France. Fuminating on the swarms of nasty immigrants coming to Europe, Carver sadly complains that many are "black Africans". Oh dear. There are constant snipes at Britain's "working class" too.
The narcissistic ending is embarrasing. It's like the US evacuation of Saigon.
Very few Paraguayan's make it into the book. And Carver sees little of Paraguay outside of Asuncion. Carver superficially describes Paraguay's Colorados one-party state's profound levels of political corruption (mainly from reading the local paper), but there is no analysis of it's roots. And certainly nothing about current threats to the Paraguayan people; the soya monoculture with it's forced evictions and toxic spraying, repressive 'anti-terrorist' legislation and the growing geo-political importance of the Guarani aquifer with it's collosal freshwater reserves.
Anyone thinking of buying this of Amazon; don't. The only useful thing is it's well annotated reading list. Get John Gimlette's far superior book. His love of Paraguay and Paraguayans shines through. And as his non-materialistic view of Paraguayan history is a tad simplistic, get Richard Gott's 'Land Without Evil' and John Hemming's 'Red Gold' for historical background on this fascinating, overlooked region.
And for anyone thinking of visting this strange, beautiful country, which has a charm all of it's won, do. Don't let this self-obsessed, lazy rubbish put you off.
What a badly written book!!!! - Rated
I doubt that the author has even been to Paraguay. Too many inaccuracies all over the book. Names of places and people mis-spelled (if I were to write a book about a place -specially if I claim I have been there- I woluld make sure I take note of the name of places I supposedly have been to. A few examples: Itapa hydroelectric dam for Itaipu, San Juan Caballero or San Pedro Caballero City for Pedro Juan Caballero, Jalapa for Jopara (language of mixed-spanish guarani origin).
Babies no allowed on the street for fear of been snatch by vultures, being randomly attacked by a machete holding person in the city centre, vampire bats in the hotel room, people travelling in planes holding firearms, c'mon this a work of fiction, not a travel book. This man is trying to make people think he was living in dangerously, when probably, if he ever went to Paraguay, he really had the most boring trip of his life!!!. Read it as a novel and you might enjoy it, try to get any real information about the country from this book and you'll realise this book isn't worth a penny. If I wasn't as honest as I am,it would have been returned and a full refund requested. It is now ending where it belongs: the bin!!
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