The Green Pope

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Delacorte Press, 1971 - Avarice - 386 pages
The author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, tells the story of an ugly American, George Maker Thompson. Thompson was a pirate in the Caribbean but feels that he's wasted his time as a pirate on the sea and that making money on the water will not lead to the riches that he wants to accumulate. It’s not a particularly secret wisdom that those who have wealth are likely to have power too. After all, it’s money that makes the world go round... at least a materialistic world like ours. Little wonder that our society produces considerable numbers of men and women whose primary goal in life is to gain money and ever more money. In The Green Pope by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemalan winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1967 “for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin-America”, a young American who cares for nothing but wealth and power starts a banana plantation in Guatemala mercilessly ruining, driving out or even killing small local farmers and opponents on his rise. Neither the suicide of his fiancé, the death of his wife in childbirth or the pregnancy of his unmarried daughter make him reconsider his priorities.

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Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
13
Section 3
23
Copyright

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About the author (1971)

Novelist, playwright, poet, translator, and diplomat, Miguel Asturias received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 for what was considered highly colored writing rooted in national individuality and Indian tradition. His first novel, El Senor Presidente, a fictional account of the period of violence and human degradation under the Guatemalan dictator Estrada Cabrera, was completed in 1932 but not published until 1946 for political reasons. It was pioneering in its use of surrealistic structures and Indian myth as integrated parts of the novel's structure. Mulata (1963) uses a Guatemalan version of the legend of Faust as a point of departure for Asturias's inventive use of Indian myth. In 1966, Asturias received the Lenin Peace Prize for writings that expose American intervention against the Guatemalan people. Following the 1954 uprising, Asturias was deprived of his citizenship by the new government and lived in exile for eight years. After the election of President Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro in 1967, he was restored to his country's diplomatic services as ambassador to Paris and continued to publish.

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