In Guatemala, El Señor Presidente received significant attention from the date of its first publication. Mostly this was from other left-wing writers and intellectuals, who recognized and praised both its stylistic innovation and its political commitment, if sometimes with the complaint that the novel was overly influenced by European modernism.[75] But, as Dante Liano observes, "those in power have not been able to stand Asturias's voice".[76]
Critical reception elsewhere in Latin America was also enthusiastic. One of the book's first reviewers was María Rosa Oliver, writing in the influential Argentine journal Sur shortly after the novel's second edition was produced in Buenos Aires. She particularly praises the plot: the fact that the novel is more than simply a lyrical still life. Rather, she argues, El Señor Presidente "stirs our five senses." And her conclusion stresses the book's Latin American qualities, arguing that it "enchants us, stirs us, moves us, and softens us all at the same time, producing much the same effect as when we travel, eyes and heart wide open, around these Latin American lands or the pages that tell their history."[77]
Before long the novel's fame spread around the world. The first award Asturias received for El Señor Presidente was the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1952.[78] El Señor Presidente has steadily garnered further acclaim. In the words of literary scholar Jack Himelblau, the book is "an avant-garde and critically significant novel in the history of Spanish-American fiction"[79] and Latin American history and literature scholar Charles Macune includes El Señor Presidente in a list of prominent translated Latin American novels.[80] For Macune, novels and novelists of Latin America are "both history makers as well as reflections of the region's history".[81] Unlike Latin American newspapers and archival materials, translated Latin American novels are far more accessible to readers without a knowledge of Spanish.[82] In fact, Macune shows that El Señor Presidente has been well-received not only in its original Spanish but also in its English translation.
Nobel Prize
In December 1967 Asturias won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his life's work, including El Señor Presidente. Upon receiving the prize, he gave a lecture regarding Latin American literature as both "testimony" and "instrument for struggle".[83] In particular, he spoke about the possibility of forging a new style of novel in Latin America, drawing on the region's indigenous heritage. This new style would make the novel a vehicle of hope and light in what he termed "this night that threatens us now". It would be "the affirmation of the optimism of those writers that defied the Inquisition, opening a breach in the conscience of the people for the march of the Liberators".[83]
The Nobel Prize Committee, in awarding the prize, described El Señor Presidente in the following terms:
This magnificent and tragic satire criticizes the prototype of the Latin American dictator who appeared in several places at the beginning of the century and has since reappeared, his existence being fostered by the mechanism of tyranny which, for the common man, makes every day a hell on earth. The passionate vigour with which Asturias evokes the terror and distrust which poisoned the social atmosphere of the time makes his work a challenge and an invaluable aesthetic gesture.[84]
Asturias's home country celebrated his international recognition. In Guatemala his face soon adorned postage stamps, a street was named after him, and he received a medal.[85] According to Kjell Strömberg in The 1967 Prize, "the whole of his little country was given over to rejoicing".[85] Further admiration was expressed throughout Latin America, where Asturias's Nobel Prize was viewed as an accomplishment for Latin American literature as a whole, rather than the achievement of a single author or country.[85] As scholar Richard Jewell notes, there had been substantial criticism that Latin American writers were being ignored by the Nobel committee. Beginning with Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967, however, the academy selected four Latin American writers within twenty-four years.[86]
Biographer Gregory Rabassa, who has translated other works by Asturias, highlights the effects of the Nobel Prize on Asturias's subsequent work, saying, "[h]is winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 gave him a long-awaited financial independence that ... enabled him to withdraw to his writing and the many aims and possibilities that [had] been on his mind for so many years".[87]
