Guido Rodriguez Alcalá (born Asunción, Paraguay, 1946) is a poet, narrator, historian, journalist, essayist, and literary critic.
This play has a wide selection of letters interchanged between Artigas and Paraguay’s Government Board, that show some less known aspects of Paraguayan history.
but that was my advantage in my trip to Rio: Paraguay’s provisory government had asked the Brazilians to hold me like a war prisoner because in Paraguay I could do a mess, they say, buy I took advantage of my trip to make good relations that would work for me.In 2002, Guido Rodríguez Alcalá took farther Paraguayan history with his novel Velasco to put it correctly in its regional environment, in the time just before the independence, and examine the political processes that had happened to reach to it and to speculate with documented facts about what had happened.
And not just because we are not in front of a treacherous like Caballero, but also because Velasco lacks contradictions and invites to the credibility; and because the language used by the author incites the readers to identify themselves with the narrator.
In fact, when we confront an unclear subject that is slightly manipulated by the official historiography, it seems that Rodriguez Alcalá is abandoning part of his previous attacking aim.
And that truth implies stripping some of the affirmations of the official historiography: that way, Velasco says (page 58) that on May 16, 1811 “there was no tricolor flag ran up like people had said.
When that system isn’t enough to update the text, the author does not doubt to turn his characters into visionaries (“those porteños [...] will still guilt us of their own mistakes within 100 years” page.
However, the most used resource is the irony: «not a single French philosopher had taken care of this business, so we don’t have a fiction such as the hatch about the Jesuit system» (page.
As we’ve seen, “Donde ladrón no llega”, “Vagos sin tierra” and “Velasco” are three approaches to Colonial Paraguay’s history and intrahistory.
Three extraordinary novels that witness the validity of historic narrative in Paraguay during the change of century; and that show the existence of mature authors that had known how to create an own literary voice.