Augusto Roa Bastos  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Augusto Roa Bastos, (June 13, 1917 – April 26, 2005) was a noted Paraguayan novelist and short story writer, and one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor. He is best known for his complex novel Yo el Supremo (I, the Supreme) and for his reception of the Premio Cervantes in 1989, Spanish literature's most prestigious prize. Yo el Supremo is one of the foremost Latin American novels to tackle the topic of the dictator. It explores the dictations and inner thoughts of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay with an iron fist and no little eccentricity from 1814 until his death in 1840.

Roa Bastos' life and writing were marked by military dictators. In 1947 he was forced into exile in Argentina by the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and in 1976 he fled Buenos Aires for France in similar political circumstances. Most of Roa Bastos' work was written in exile, but this did not deter him from fiercely tackling Paraguayan social and historical issues in his work. Writing in a Spanish that was at times heavily accented with Guaraní words (the Paraguayan indigenous language), Roa Bastos incorporated Paraguayan myths and symbols into a Baroque style known as magic realism. He is considered a late-comer to the Latin American Boom literary movement. Roa Bastos' personal canon includes the novels Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man) and El fiscal (1993; The Prosecutor), as well as numerous other novels, short stories, poems, and screenplays.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Augusto Roa Bastos" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools