[Men of Maize], both the fountainhead and the backbone of all that is being written on our continent today, has suffered a strange fate, like so many works which close a period and open up a new epoch.

Many essayists have judged the novel deficient, pointing to its lack of unity, its ungainly and evasive segmentation and its vacillation between genres, in contrast to that solid cathedral of dynamic coherence, that satanic church, El Señor Presidente, the most famous of Asturias' novels…. Many critics dispose of Men of Maize in a couple of lines or ignore it altogether, irritated by this confusing, explosive offshoot which cannot be comfortably fit into the orderly evolution of the author toward the political themes of his banana trilogy. (p. 12)

A few critics have recognized the extraordinary quality of the novel, although they have not succeeded in refuting the arguments of its...