Men of maize

Penguin Classics follows its reprint of Asturias's debut political novel, Mr. President, with the Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan author's 1949 masterpiece about the existential struggle between rapacious Westerners and their Ladino collaborators, intent on dominating and exploiting natural resources, and Native peoples who experience and participate in nature as a sacred whole. Asturias was inspired to recast French surrealism through Mayan myth and tradition and set the narrative in Guatemala's mountain forests, creating a uniquely Indigenous expression that situates his epic at the headwaters of Latin American magical realism, alongside Brazilian writer Mario Andrade's similarly inspired (though far less somber) Macunaíma. Swirling cascades of incantatory prose, lush with sensual impressions and dire mystical import, tell of the cruel fate of Gaspar Ilóm, scourge of the corn planters in life and in death. Readers follow the forlorn search of a blind husband for his lost wife and a postman's self-deliverance into the underworld, where he meets his nahual or animal spirit, a coyote. Translator Martin's thorough introduction (new to this edition) and abundant footnotes provide helpful explication of Mayan mythology and lifeways, but readers will be able to intuit much of this through the vivid imagery and rhythmic potency of Asturias's prose alone. VERDICT An extraordinary, incomparable work of world literature that requires and rewards multiple readings.