Home  /  Back to disciplines  /  Request exam/desk copy  /  Purchase  /  View cart  /  Checkout

The President

Miguel Angel Asturias (translated by Frances Partridge)

Fiction. In English translation.   Guatemalan diplomat and writer Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) began this award-winning work while still a law student. It is a story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed Latin American country usually identified as Guatemala. The book has been acclaimed for portraying both a totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects. Drawing from his experiences as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Asturias employs such literary devices as satire to convey the government’s transgressions and surrealistic dream sequences to demonstrate the police state’s impact on the individual psyche. Asturias’s stance against all forms of injustice in Guatemala caused critics to view the author as a compassionate spokesperson for the oppressed. My work,” Asturias promised when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, “will continue to reflect the voice of the people, gathering their myths and popular beliefs and at the same time seeking to give birth to a universal consciousness of Latin American problems.”

288 pages, $14.95 list

10-digit ISBN: 0-88133-951-2

13-digit ISBN: 978-0-88133-951-2

© 1963

“[Asturias] has achieved in a splendid manner a grotesque and almost asphyxiating conception of the total state. When the reader puts down the novel, he does so with a feeling of compassion and, at the same time, relief that he has not had to live through similar circumstances.” —T. B. Irving, Inter-American Review of Bibliography

“Asturias leaves no doubt about what it is like to be tortured, or what it is like to work for a man who is both omnipotent and depraved.” — Times Literary Supplement

“I’m glad to see it back in print as it is still an excellent means of introducing students in the Latin America survey course to life under a dictator.”  — John Bell, Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne

“. . . the best novel about dictators ever written in Latin America.”  — Eduardo Geleano, Los Angeles Times Book Review