Contact: Dr. Rosa Pelz Galpern, Editor Tel: +54 (11) 4775-9228 / 4777-6765 Email: ventas@gritosagrado.com.

ar March 27, 2013 For Immediate Distribution Grito Sagrado Press Presents its new Novel The Lieutenant of San Porfirio The magical realism in this novel so resembles socialist Venezuela that it is hard not to attribute first and last names to the novel's protagonists. Those who seek to understand the reality of life in that country, or who simply seek to enjoy a riveting story should read The Lieutenant of San Porfirio" Dr. Alejandro Toledo President of Per 2001-2006 Recently released by Grito Sagrado Press in Buenos Aires, Argentina the first novel of Joel D. Hirst will best be remembered for its richness of narrative and deep historical reflections and perceptions on the challenges of those who live in todays socialist Venezuela. The vehicle of the novel has a long history in Latin America as a method to transmit political observations and criticisms regarding the unending experiments with authoritarianism and caudillismo in the region. The Lieutenant of San Porifio follows this noble tradition, using stylistic methods like magical realism, multiple points of view and profound power dynamics to present the crude reality of the new socialist autocracies on the continent of South America. Grito Sagrado Press, with its deep commitment to liberty is pleased to present this new and important work. Dr. Rosa Pelz Galperin -More below-

Book Review: The Lieutenant of San Porfirio by Joel D. Hirst, Grito Sagrado Press, Buenos Aires Argentina By Jon B. Perdue Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, written in 1845 by Argentine writer and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, is considered to be the original dictator novel. Sarmientos target in the novel was Facundo Quiroga, who had sacked his hometown of San Juan when he was a teenager. Since then the dictator novel has become a standard of Latin American literature, written as a social protest against the seemingly perennial recurrence of the caudillo, a Spanish colloquialism for the strong-man autocrat that has bedeviled the region since the fitful start of its independence. Though these novels have always been written by Latin American authors whose worldviews were developed under the inescapable gaze of their protagonists, a new novel written by American author Joel D. Hirst breaks the mold of the normal fare of the genre. The Lieutenant of San Porfirio is a roman clef set in modern day Venezuela, ground zero of the latest recurrence of Latin American caudillos, where Hugo Chvez led the internationalized anti-Americanism of modern autocracies, and incidentally, where Hirst spent his high school years as well as another four years as an employee of the American Embassy during the most turbulent clashes between Chvezs stumbling autocracy and an organized but overwhelmed opposition. This experience gave Hirst a unique perspective from which to write his allegory for U.S. readers, who have long missed the nuance of earlier dictator novels that is invariably lost in translation from their original Spanish. Since returning to the U.S. in 2010, Hirst has made a name for himself as a Latin America scholar and policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Human Freedom Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute and as a columnist for the Huffington Post, The Commentator, Latin American Herald Tribune and Fox News. Normally, this would not bode well for a foray into fiction, as policy writers seldom make smooth transitions from analysis to storytelling. But Hirsts first foray into fiction shows a surprising versatility, as well as a descriptive ability that understands and portrays the use of subtlety rather than blunt force when laying bare the dictator and the slow ruin of his subjects. He describes the rustic pangs of an oppressed underclass with understated precision: Beside the structure, five or six scraggly, naked children played with an underfed dog, whose ribs thrust through its paper-thin skin in a silent appeal for basic human decency. Hirst also pays tribute to Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosas Feast of the Goat, which described so vividly the monstrous details of Rafael Trujillos dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. From the earliest Greek mythology, and throughout Hebrew and Christian scripture, the goat has long symbolized the damned or the subjugated, but in Latin American literature it has more often served as a sotto voce representation of the oppressor. Wherever it has proved life-threatening to openly mock the reigning authority figure, the creative voice of Latin American writers has often been extruded through the cracks in the those dictatorships in the form of delicious irony - just subtle enough to escape the regimes censors and sharp enough to hit its mark among readers. The symbolic goat appears throughout The Lieutenant of San Porfirio, first as it is trampled underfoot by an armored column of the revolutionary army of the dictator as it interrupts the lives of indifferent peasants whose cause he claims to champion. The goat will serve its master, eat whatever it is given, and carry on without protest, and so should they. The goat appears later in a story-within-a-story allusion to Fidel Castro in an allegorical conversation between Fidel and a talking goat named Esteban, a reference to the Venezuelan oppositions name for Chvez. The anecdote also references revolutionary mural painting by gullible foreigners who have actually traveled to Cuba to take part in the Venceremos Brigades, cutting sugar cane to show solidarity with the dictatorship.

The story is framed by an Ozymandian proclamation by the books protagonist, Lieutenant Juan Machado, who tells the group of American ego-tourists who have just painted a revolutionary mural that it will last for a thousand years upon this wall, just before the regimes tour guides whitewash it to prepare for the next group of weekend revolutionaries from America. Hirsts depiction of the stratification of Venezuelan society shows proper deference to the wisdom of those at the bottom, who have, historically, simply endured stoically the vicissitudes of politics under both populists and reformers, and ignored the entreaties of guerrillas and autocrats, while it has been the pampered offspring of the elite that have filled their cadres. The plot of the novel runs parallel to events over the last decade in Venezuela, and a subplot pits two student activists from antithetical ends of the political spectrum against the backdrop of a country in chaos, where they must navigate the labyrinth of class hierarchies and populist politics imposed on them by the dictator. Hirsts deftness with subtlety allows character development that explores, without condescension or oversimplification, the differing points of view of the societal turmoil as it engulfs the startled elite as well as the newly-empowered militant underclass. A central figure in the book, Doa Esmeralda, exemplifies Venezuelas amos del valle - the gilded elite who are descended from the colonial aristocracy and feel entitled to forever lord over the country. The author rightly shows how this crony capitalist class, by sidling up to favorable governments to protect themselves from competition, most often produce the inevitable backlash that ushers in autocrats like Chvez. While most modern dictator novels have been written long after the dictator has been dispatched, Hirsts portrayal of modern Venezuela is the first of these to hit bookstores at the same time that the dictator won another term in office before succumbing to cancer. This book could well be considered the epitaph of that bte noire. Jon B. Perdue is the director of Latin America programs at the Fund for American Studies, and is the author of The War of All The People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism (Potomac Books, 2012).