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It is definitely another totalitarian novel and not saying that I like to read this kind of Literature but it is so descriptive and so vivid -not like Facundo- that I almost see myself running and hiding and seeking for help in the streets of Guatemala.

In the first chapters I love the way he introduced the lectors by presenting the main characters which in a general basis are all the peasants, and poor people from Guatemala which in every part of the world and mostly in the poor countries are the ones who suffered the most due to the ambitious goals of their Governments.
Not to mention that by presenting these general society, all the compelling stories that happens with Mosquito, Zany, and Angel Face are related to the President so this in means to prove again what a society can be changed, transformed, created with the vision of the man who governs it. Through out the history of Latin America we can see how these people who live in marginal conditions have naturally wanting or not be dependant of the State.

It is maybe with the fantasy and language he uses with the one Asturias is making a protest and satirized novel of a Dictatorship in Guatemala which never places us in a specific time or place but seems to be one of those in which every character of the novel will be subjugated to the aims of a terrible, mighty, unscrupulous President.

Another thing that seems interesting for me is the vivid descriptions of how the children and youth people are getting used to live with all the tyranny at the right hand of the corner, maybe all the analogies Asturias did with these young people is because when he has at that age is the way in which he lived. Its like having Asturias as the main character but trying to narrate his experience in this Dictatorship throughout his pen. Again the mighty pen.

As my way through this first half of the President I also can see another dichotomy as the one analyzed in Facundo but in here is not civilization and barbarism but rather than “life or death” having the hopes to be freed, or their destinies to be reached.

Seems to be like a nightmare in which we cannot escape because after each chapter we have more and more tragic, violent schemes in which we can’t escape., hard to say these but seems to me in the first chapters that is with irony in which he denigrates humans as animals by the way they are treated like the beggars, the way in which with an inhuman cruelty he narrates how Fedina is tortured or how they kill Zany.

Maybe this is the style in which Asturias wants us to keep the track while reading the book, so that we cannot escape until we finished with the most tragic element. Which will it be? Will Angel Face be able to find a solution for the dichotomy of life and death, -The President and Camilla’s love- it seems to be as the death or the romantic life which in a moment like a Dictatorship era I doubt he could find the magic one.