Robert Carver’s first book, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, was very fine, flawed only by the author’s black view of life. I hoped for the same virtues in this: an idiosyncratic take on things, an enjoyment and exploration of the absurdity of the human condition, and a profound understanding of the history and mores of his subject. I feared the same vices. The greatest travel-writing leaves the self behind. Would this book also be marred by Carver’s polemics?

I was not disappointed – in either respect. Carver catches the quick of Paraguay. If you have strained at the implications of Louis de Bernières’s splendid South American novels, read this. You will find the fictional fantasies mild by comparison with Carver’s facts. In “the baroque criminality” of Paraguay, a curiosity of political posters is that many are hand-painted. “Printing them was more expensive than getting peons to hand-render them.” Carver finds a lake “filled up with human excrement, produced by émigré German Nazis who lived in luxury villas on the lake shore”.

The vice is the author’s overintrusion, and his distaste for the West – which enables his travels. He tells us too often that we are “beasts too stupid” to look after ourselves and “too placid to revolt”. Once he would have been a turbulent priest. Now he just seems angry. But the compensations are legion. I hope that he writes on for a very long time.

PARADISE WITH SERPENTS: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay by Robert Carver

Harper Perennial, £8.99

Buy the book here at the offer price of £8.54 (free p&p)

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