History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10 · Translated from Spanish (original title El recurso del método)

• Accuracy: A composite Latin American dictator, drawn from several real ones, in the early twentieth century.
• Readability: Rich and witty, though baroque in style.
• Plot: A cultured dictator divides his time between Paris salons and brutal campaigns at home against rebellions.

The First Magistrate, ruler of an unnamed Latin American country, loves Paris. He lives there in luxury, attends salons, collects art and quotes Descartes. When rebellions break out at home, he returns to crush them with ferocity, then goes back to Paris.

Alejo Carpentier’s novel is a satire of dictatorship and of the cultural pretensions of Latin American elites. The original title plays on Descartes’s Discourse on Method: the dictator’s method is violence and opportunism.

The First Magistrate is a vivid creation, charming, cynical, ruthless and increasingly ridiculous. He is modelled on several real rulers, and the novel’s picture of Latin America in the early twentieth century, dominated by foreign companies and US interests, is sharp.

The Paris scenes are witty, satirising European condescension and the dictator’s desire to be accepted. The novel’s final chapters show his fall and exile.

The weakness is that the satire can be broad, and the baroque style occasionally obscures the story. The characters around the dictator are mostly sketches.

The 7 reflects an entertaining and pointed novel, lighter than Explosion in a Cathedral. It is one of three major dictator novels published in 1974–75, and it is the funniest.