In its pages one can easily discern the origins of two phenomena that the rest of the world has come to associate with twentieth-century Latin American literature: the genre known as the dictator novel and the style called magical realism. But it also ranks as one of the most important and influential works of modern Latin American literature, a kind of urtext for the celebrated generation of novelists that followed Asturias and gained global recognition in the 1960s and 1970s as members of “El Boom”: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Roa Bastos, and several others.Įven a cursory reading of David Unger’s new translation of Asturias’s novel establishes why it has had such an enormous impact. When he finally self-published the novel in Mexico in 1946, it was riddled with typographical errors, and a definitive edition did not appear until 1952.įrom the beginning, then, El Señor Presidente has been star-crossed.
He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for money, only to find that his work was unpublishable because the dictator whose reign it portrayed had given way to an even more cruel and oppressive one.
Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922.
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