Novel · A way to begin
The President
El señor Presidente
Miguel Ángel Asturias · 1946
Synopsis
One night, beneath the Portal of the Lord where the beggars sleep, the Pelele, a simpleton driven mad by mockery, kills Colonel Parrales Sonriente, the President's henchman. The dictator uses the crime to ruin his enemies, General Eusebio Canales and the lawyer Abel Carvajal, and instructs his favourite, Miguel Face-of-an-Angel, to push Canales into fleeing so that he can be shot down on the way. But Face-of-an-Angel falls in love with Camila, the general's daughter.
Context
The novel, which describes without naming it the dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, was written in Paris between 1923 and 1933, in the vicinity of the Surrealists and of the courses in Maya ethnology at the Sorbonne. Its author, who had returned to his country under another dictatorship, did not take the manuscript with him, aware of what it contained: the book remained unpublished for thirteen years and appeared in Mexico in 1946, thanks to the change of regime. The dictator hardly appears in it: it is the fear he inspires that occupies the book, and the language follows its disorder.
Who it is for
A crafted language, with plays on sound that resist translation. The opening is disorienting, then the machinery of fear sweeps everything along.
Prizes and reception
Founder of the dictator novel, a major genre of Latin American letters, it won its author the prize for Best Foreign Book in France.