Mr. President by Miguel Ángel Asturias (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Mr. President by Miguel Ángel Asturias
• Vivian Arimany (bio)

mr. president Miguel Ángel Asturias
Translated by David Unger
Penguin Books
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667936/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias-a-new-translation-by-david-unger-foreword-by-mario-vargas-llosa-introduction-by-gerald-martin/
282 pages; Print, $18.00

The prime of the Latin American Boom feels long evanesced. At the same time, its literary traditions and tendencies have never felt more present, a very loud guest at one's house. With the recent critical and commercial success of authors such as Mónica Ojeda, Samanta Schweblin (winner of the 2022 National Book Award for translation), and Mariana Enriquez, among others, the global market is clearly still fascinated with Latin American literature that [End Page 79] blurs distinctions between fantasy and literary fiction (whether through its plot line or writing style). Judging by the content of Latin American novels widely read in the United States, a window is never just a threshold from inside to outside but to also to another side in the region's literary tradition. In the 1960s publishers had a name for this tendency: magical realism, exploited by authors such as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. Some Anglophone publishers will still adhere to this terminology. I find it more productive to reject it, for its usage perpetuates a colonizing paternalism from the United States toward the Latin American continent.

Mr. President, by Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, deserves a place in the canon of not just Latin American, but world literature. This is a novel that, as much as it is a classic (it was originally published in 1946), remains relevant now in the twenty-first century. Asturias's seminal work is a historical novel criticizing the Guatemalan dictatorial regime of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920). Despite drawing heavily from actual horrendous violations of human rights during Estrada Cabrera's dominion, the name of the country or the titular dictator is never stated. Even though the novel was published long after Estrada Cabrera's reign of terror, it coincided with another dictatorial project: Jorge Ubico's (1931–44). The plot centers around the unnamed dictator and the ways in which he terrorizes the country's community. There is an element of social awareness, for the narrator focuses on depicting how the less privileged (women, sex workers, queer and disabled people, homeless folks, etc.) are persecuted by the dictator's pervasive fist. In fact, the first chapter (aptly titled "In the Portal del Señor") centers around a group of beggars who live in the shadows of a portal. The events that constitute the novel's story are catapulted by the murder of one of those beggars, nicknamed Pelele, who also happens to be mentally disabled. A recurring secondary character is an indigenous mother who meets a tragic ending. Her presence in the novel (as well as Pelele's) shows Asturias's attentiveness to the intersectionality of identities and positions the author as an early indigenist intellectual. Asturias was fascinated with indigenous folktales and traditions, embodied in an earlier publication of his: Legends of Guatemala (1930).

An often-overlooked portion of the plot is the forbidden love between Miguel Angel Face (the dictator's right hand) and Camila (daughter of the dictator's archnemesis). The novel's marketing as a dictator novel (a famed [End Page 80] lore in Latin American literature) prevents it from being perceived as a love story. Even though I am not arguing that one label should be replaced by the other, I do believe that recognizing Mr. President as both things informs its complexities.

Publishing earlier than the authors of the Boom, Asturias can be seen as the precursor to the authors who plunged Latin American literature into mainstream success. Asturias was, in fact, the second author from the region to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (it could not have been a coincidence that the accolade came roughly parallel with the Boom), awarded to him in 1967. In that regard he had been preceded by Gabriela Mistral (1945) and would be followed by García Márquez (1982). However, Asturias is anything but...