Doomed to Remain Timely and Topical

May 16, 2023 9:12 AM

The plot of Mr. President is deceptively simple, with most of the action taking place over a single week. When a half-crazed beggar accidentally kills a particularly brutal colonel in a fit of rage, the president decides to pin the blame on a general and his lawyer, whose political loyalty he has begun to doubt. This sets in motion a series of interlinked schemes and machinations that result in the imprisonment, torture, death, bondage, or general ruination of assorted government higher-ups, who suspect what is coming, and ordinary citizens, who do not. from The Inventor of Magical Realism by Larry Rohter [NYRB; ungated]
posted by chavenet (5 comments total)

This book sounds very much up my alley! Now to find a good bookstore in Philadelphia...
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:23 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

This book looks really good: I love me political intrigue and magical realism -- so thanks for pointing it out to us!
posted by wenestvedt at 11:42 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Interesting to learn about Asturias, I hadn't heard of him or this book. It definitely sounds interesting, thanks for posting. There aren't a lot of Guatemalan authors to explore, so it's good to learn a new name to add to the list.

Since the article doesn't mention her, I thought it was worth noting that many people credit María Luisa Bombal as the inventor of magical realism, with her books La última niebla (The Final Mist) published in 1934, and La amortajada (The Deceased Woman) published in 1938.

I personally really enjoyed La última niebla, quite a head trip, and incredibly poetic writing in Spanish. (She later reworked it into a longer English version called The House of Mist that I haven't read.)
posted by umber vowel at 11:55 AM on May 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

I just picked up this book around a month ago and now I have to read it.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:27 PM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

It is the bourgeois writers, he wants to say here, who ignore the looting of their resources by the rich behemoth to the north, which then turns around and redeploys those riches on death squads and dictators. It is no surprise, then, that Asturias’s landmark novel, Mr. President, confronts its readers with similar frankness. Mr. President examines widespread corruption around a fictional Guatemalan dictator. But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.

from A NOVEL THE CIA SPENT A FORTUNE TO SUPPRESS
posted by chavenet at 2:43 AM on May 24, 2023