El Señor Presidente

El Señor Presidente is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. The novel’s title character was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Asturio received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his entire body of work in 1967.

About El Señor Presidente in brief

El Señor Presidente is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. The novel’s title character was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. In 1967, Asturio received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his entire body of work. Since then, El Seña Presidente has been adapted for the screen and theater. The themes of the novel center around the experience of living under a dictatorship and the alienation produced by tyranny. The style of El SeñOr Presidente influenced a generation of Latin American authors, including Arturo Uslar Pietri and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. The book was written in France and is set in an unnamed Latin American country, governed by an unnamed President in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. There is still plenty of support linking the novel to the Manuel E Strada Cabrera era in Guatemala. For example, as critic Jack Himelblau explains, “Asturias wrote his novel primarily with his compatriots in mind, who, undoubtedly, had lived through the tyranny of EstrADA Cabrera from 1898 to 1920.’” The novel was published in Mexico in 1946, but the strict censorship policies of Guatemalan dictatorial governments delayed its publication for thirteen years. In a 1970 interview, the German critic Gunter W. Lorenz asked Miguel Lorenz why he began to write and the novelist replied: Yes, at 10: 25 pm on the 25th of December in 1917, an earthquake destroyed my city.

I saw something like an immense cloud conceal the enormous moon. It was then that I wrote my first poem, a song of farewell to Guatemala. Later, I was angered by the circumstances during which the rubble was cleared away and by the social injustice that became so bloodily apparent. The novel is one of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, and is a landmark text in Latin American literature. It was written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author’s home town. The author’s use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia, simile, and repetition of particular phrases, combined with a discontinuous structure, springs from surrealist and ultraist influences. It is a classic example of magic realism, a literary technique now known as ‘magical realism’ and ‘the magic realism of the 20th century’ The novel’s themes include the inability to tell reality apart from dreams, the power of the written word in the hands of authorities, and thealienation produced by the dictatorship. In the novel, the President opts to defend himself against criminal charges rather than go into exile, however, he had the opportunity to base his observations on his own fictional leader—the disgraced leader, Gregory Rabassa—on the base of his own observations of the popular disturbances.

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Nobel Prize Ryan Cabrera Nobel Prize in Literature Nobel Peace Prize