With David Unger’s brilliant translation of Mr. President by the Guatemalan Nobel Prize–winner Miguel Asturias, readers are newly invited to encounter the author’s extraordinary and darkly prescient satire of life under brutal dictatorship ... What makes Mr. President extraordinary is not simply its enduring subject, but also its operatic and inventive multiform style: as Martin points out, it’s a novel 'very like a play, a tightly concocted drama (at times a theater of marionettes),' equally cinematic and poetic. It is reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett in its surreal flights within the consciousnesses of the mad or dying, or within the narrative of myth ... The novel’s vision is relentlessly dark, but its execution is exhilarating, daring, even wild. Asturias’s boldness is repeatedly arresting, and his descriptions unforgettable...Such electrifying vividness animates every page. Not without good reason does Vargas Llosa hail Mr. President as 'one of the most original Latin American texts ever written.'
... a formidable new English translation of his crucial work ... the story speaks not only to Latin America’s cycles of tyranny but to a United States and a Europe confronting, for the first time since it was published, in 1946, a new wave of authoritarian leaders on the rise ... what makes “El Señor Presidente” a 'tour de force of great originality,' as the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa notes in a foreword to the new translation, is not its plot but its use of language, with invented words, songs, rhythms, and 'astonishing metaphors'.
... masterful translation ... Reading Mr. President, it’s impossible not to think about the current, sad situation in Guatemala, where endemic corruption, lawlessness, savage drug traffickers, heartless human smugglers and staggering economic inequality — combined with climate change-induced agricultural woes — have driven hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to attempt risky illegal entry into the United States. (Guatemala consistently is rated among the most corrupt countries by international good-government advocates.)
