Not The Usual Route to A Successful Novel

Take a look at Public Books' A Novel the CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress:

But the problem with Asturias, at least for Mundo Nuevo’s backers, was not strictly aesthetic. Cold War politics was at issue. The US not only supported or helped install these despots, it also quietly backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anticommunist front created to push pro-American narratives through magazines like Mundo Nuevo and dozens more around the world.

As the Congress disparaged Asturias, Gerald Martin, then a young scholar, spoke out to both defend the author and challenge Mundo Nuevo’s biases (though at the time he couldn’t know about its American patronage, which was classified). Martin assailed its editor in chief for refusing to recognize the Boom’s undeniable forerunner. And even beyond Martin’s incensed critiques, Asturias was a thorny problem for Mundo Nuevo. His work challenged the Boom’s creation myth, part of which held that American culture had inspired and would promote the new oeuvre. But like many great books, Mr. President refused to go away—a persistence that culminated, in 1967, with Asturias being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Eventually the Congress was discredited as a CIA front. But as a result of the high Cold War’s equivalent of a shadow ban, Guatemalan American novelist David Unger’s masterful, clear new translation presents an opening for the Nobel laureate (who died in 1974). A new generation of North American readers will gain access to his witty, influential, and wrongly maligned masterpiece.

The first thing to say is that this backstory—of suppression and defiance and politics—matters. In his introduction, Martin repeatedly forces readers to look at Mr. President as a work that, though suppressed, was contemporary to Ulysses, early Faulkner, Woolf, and Proust. To understand this is to understand the Guatemalan as a modernist innovator, as Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío was for poetry. Unger’s translation must be welcomed, and Mr. President itself must again be praised.

 And then to win the Nobel Prize for Literature!

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