What the Swedes Read: Miguel Ángel Asturias

• LAUREATE: Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967, Guatemala)
• BOOK READ: El Señor Presidente, translated by Frances Partridge

Before I read this book, I was against dictatorships. I mean, of course I was. Who isn’t? We know what happens with political dictatorships. Everyone is miserable. Voices are suppressed. People are slaughtered in the streets. Nowadays you’d get more people speaking up in favor of monarchy.

But monarchy, of course, is a form of government that was vastly popular, or at least put up with, for a long time, before time marched on, and to engage with the work of Miguel Ángel Asturias was to remind myself of a context in which dictatorship was regarded, at least by some, as a bona fide form of keeping a country in order rather than as an idea on its way—sadly, not quickly enough—to history’s dustbin. Coming into prominence in the 1930s, Asturias served as a cultural ambassador not just for Guatemala but for all of Latin America, trumpeting the notion, more rattling then than it is today, that putting exclusive political power in the hands of a single individual might be kind of a bad plan. (One of his other ideas, less obvious and more scandalous back in the day, was that the native peoples of Latin America were getting screwed by colonialism.) I knew that my images of Latin American dictatorships—everyone is miserable, voices are suppressed, people are slaughtered in the streets—came from the explosion of literature and culture from that region in the ’60s and ’70s, and Asturias predated this, publishing then-radical ideas that brought him not only the Nobel but the yes-you’re-reading-this-right Lenin Peace Prize the year before. Still, I was reluctant to crack this one open. I don’t like reminding myself of context when I’m reading. It’s all well and good to remember where a text sprang from, but “This must have been quite something back then” is no way get through a book. Just the title (on my edition, at least), El Señor Presidente (which I don’t think would remain untranslated from the original Norwegian, or Chinese), conjured up an image as immediate as it was familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge—and mine passes quite quickly—of Latin American history. Finished in 1933 but not published until 1946, the novel itself was suppressed, unsurprisingly, by Guatemalan authorities. It begins with a slaughter in the streets. And as for everyone being miserable:

…they threw themselves on the ground and sank into sad, agitated dreams—nightmares in which they saw famished pigs, thin women, maimed dogs and carriage wheels passing before their eyes, or a funeral procession of phantom monks going into the cathedral preceded by a sliver of...