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After the Bombs
After the Bombs is a coming of age story that holds a mirror up to the modern history of Guatemala—a funhouse mirror of richly inventive and farcical black comedy which provides a better description of life in that country than any history book ever could. It opens with the bombing of Guatemala City in 1954 when the hero, Max, is a small child. In a swiftly moving narrative, Max journeys toward adulthood, searching for his identity, for his father, and along the way, for the real Guatemala and the possibility of a society founded on human decency, after the bombs.
- GenresFictionLatin American
221 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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About the author
Arturo Arias
32 books9 followersArturo Arias (Guatemala City, 1950) is a Guatemalan novelist and critic. His early life was marked by the overthrow of democracy in 1954, and the ensuing military dictatorships and civil rebellions. These experiences, along with a visit to refugee camps on the Guatemala-Mexico border in 1982, sparked his dedication to peoples and Indigenous rights and inspired his scholarly research.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 13, 2021
I can’t say this is an objectively bad book, but I can say I really disliked reading it. It’s an absurdist version of Guatemalan history from the 1950s through 1970s, told through the eyes of a boy named Maximo as he grows toward adulthood. This passage toward the end, as Maximo begins to explore his own writing, seems to encapsulate its philosophy (translation is mine):
“I’ll exaggerate. I’ll lie. Chingolo says that to be understood one must lie. It’s another way of getting inside someone. Begin lying fast and furiously and they’ll start to hear me. Lies are sacred, Amarena.”
The mid-20th century was a turbulent, bloody time in Guatemala, and this book is full of brutal, gruesome scenes and imagery, but in a way that seems over-the-top, disconnected from real historical events: there’s a guillotine set up in the capital’s hippodrome to execute losing jockeys; a wealthy couple kills two servants for their attraction to one another and displays their body parts; leaders of a prostitutes’ strike are executed in the manner of Aztec sacrifices, their hearts cut out with obsidian knives before throngs of people in a stadium while the American ambassador, who demanded vengeance for the death of some official, looks on approvingly. Knowing little about Guatemalan history, some of these incidents were easier for me to understand in terms of the author’s message than others. Overall though, it shouldn’t be taken literally, which for those of us unfamiliar with the place and time covered, is disorienting.
Curiously, I did a bit of online research to try to map some of these fictional events onto actual ones, and my key takeaway was that English-language sources tend to portray this period of Guatemala’s history as one of racial terror, i.e., massacres of the Mayan population. This book, on the other hand, portrays it as a period of political terror: a succession of dictatorships masquerading as democracies, the streets ruled by thuggish forces who rape and murder at will, school forever cancelled due to one political disruption or another (in what I assume is another exaggeration, Maximo “graduates” high school without ever attending a day of class; each year, school is cancelled and the students promoted anyway). I am not quite sure how to view the discrepancies between these two versions: Americans glossing over their own country’s role in overturning democratic governments unfriendly to American interests? The author glossing over genocide carried out by, I think, his own racial group? Or perhaps it’s just that this book is mostly set before the genocide really picked up, in 70s and 80s, but that ethnic cleansing naturally tends to overshadow what came before it? As with much of this book, I was left with more questions than answers.
But overall, it’s a difficult book to read, both in the way it’s put together – lack of quotation marks and speaker attributions, sudden jumps in time between paragraphs with no section breaks, etc. – and in its horrific subject matter: not a chapter passes without something gruesome and terrible, whether it’s decomposing bodies littering the streets or the lengthy and graphic rape scene midway through the book that results in permanent disfigurement for one of the victims. I can’t speak to the merits of this book for those more familiar with the time period discussed, but I’m really just glad to be done with it.
“I’ll exaggerate. I’ll lie. Chingolo says that to be understood one must lie. It’s another way of getting inside someone. Begin lying fast and furiously and they’ll start to hear me. Lies are sacred, Amarena.”
The mid-20th century was a turbulent, bloody time in Guatemala, and this book is full of brutal, gruesome scenes and imagery, but in a way that seems over-the-top, disconnected from real historical events: there’s a guillotine set up in the capital’s hippodrome to execute losing jockeys; a wealthy couple kills two servants for their attraction to one another and displays their body parts; leaders of a prostitutes’ strike are executed in the manner of Aztec sacrifices, their hearts cut out with obsidian knives before throngs of people in a stadium while the American ambassador, who demanded vengeance for the death of some official, looks on approvingly. Knowing little about Guatemalan history, some of these incidents were easier for me to understand in terms of the author’s message than others. Overall though, it shouldn’t be taken literally, which for those of us unfamiliar with the place and time covered, is disorienting.
Curiously, I did a bit of online research to try to map some of these fictional events onto actual ones, and my key takeaway was that English-language sources tend to portray this period of Guatemala’s history as one of racial terror, i.e., massacres of the Mayan population. This book, on the other hand, portrays it as a period of political terror: a succession of dictatorships masquerading as democracies, the streets ruled by thuggish forces who rape and murder at will, school forever cancelled due to one political disruption or another (in what I assume is another exaggeration, Maximo “graduates” high school without ever attending a day of class; each year, school is cancelled and the students promoted anyway). I am not quite sure how to view the discrepancies between these two versions: Americans glossing over their own country’s role in overturning democratic governments unfriendly to American interests? The author glossing over genocide carried out by, I think, his own racial group? Or perhaps it’s just that this book is mostly set before the genocide really picked up, in 70s and 80s, but that ethnic cleansing naturally tends to overshadow what came before it? As with much of this book, I was left with more questions than answers.
But overall, it’s a difficult book to read, both in the way it’s put together – lack of quotation marks and speaker attributions, sudden jumps in time between paragraphs with no section breaks, etc. – and in its horrific subject matter: not a chapter passes without something gruesome and terrible, whether it’s decomposing bodies littering the streets or the lengthy and graphic rape scene midway through the book that results in permanent disfigurement for one of the victims. I can’t speak to the merits of this book for those more familiar with the time period discussed, but I’m really just glad to be done with it.
September 4, 2025
beautiful poetic writing set in an interesting historic context (though fictionalized at times). The story is painful and sad and beautiful all the same. Sometimes so poetic it made it hard to follow.
July 4, 2023
SIX WORD REVIEW: Guatemalan history contorted into a novel.
March 15, 2021
there’s stability and security in repetition and chaos in it all the same. An exploration of what happened before with the future in sight. Love and fear, truth and desire, curiosity and wandering, what has been and what is will exist in eternity of words.
August 22, 2011
This is my original review published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1990:
AFTER THE BOMBS
By Arturo Arias, translated by Asa Zatz
Curbstone; 221 pages; $ 10.95
Arturo Arias, a Guatemalan writer who lives and teaches in Texas, works a vein of fiction that might be called Death Squad Realism.
Beyond the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American writers, Arias offers a novel piled relentlessly high with dismembered bodies and the stench of death. He loads ''After the Bombs'' with the numbing excess of Guatemala's recent history and offers a sardonic humor that would be unnerving if it did not accurately represent the Guatemalans' reaction to the absurd horror of their lives.
This is a country where political killings have claimed 100,000 lives in the past 20 years; where the CIA has been accused of toppling the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954; where brutal dictatorships have resulted in assassinations of rival politicians in the streets.
Five candidates were assassinated in the period after the 1954 bombing (by coup supporters) of Guatemala City, Arias writes. ''Panic erupted when the news came out. Tranquility returned when it was known that the army candidates had miraculously survived. Smiles reappeared once again on the faces of the grateful populace. Reconstruction forged ahead.''
The novel tells the story of Maximo, who huddles under a desk with his mother to survive the bombing and grows up to be a writer. As a child, Maximo roams the streets of Guatemala City in the dusty quiet after the bombs have finally stopped, inured to death's gargantuan scale. He and other children find a dead bird and give it a proper burial. They dig a hole in the mud and search for beautiful objects:
''Maximo was the last to return. I found a ring, he shouted. A beautiful ring. The circle of children opened to make way for him to come through and place his offering at the dead bird's feet. He was proud of his find. And it really was beautiful. Solid gold with a gorgeous aquamarine in the middle. It was beautiful even with the finger inside it.''
Maximo grows, yearning to know why his father has not been seen since the bombing. He makes friends, learning from Chingolo, an aging intellectual, what it means to be a man of action (Chingolo is not) and from Amarena, a preacher's daughter and prostitute, about the importance of the art of play. He matures, toughens and in the end comes to stand for a modicum of sanity that has been snatched from chaos.
He endures a horrible episode of forced copulation under the prodding of soldiers' guns, robbing him and the American ambassador's daughter of their virginity (they are both 13). Long after the girl, Karen, has retreated to Texas and killed herself, Maximo still sees her face in his dreams and his days.
But Maximo is a survivor. He moves on. He learns more about his country and himself, about the father who was a functionary in the post-revolutionary government that for a time curtailed the power of the army and the oligarchs. In the end, he takes action.
Arias relies too much on intentional sentence fragments and other self-conscious literary devices, and Asa Zatz's translation has some obvious flaws, but this book offers an essential and unforgettable glimpse into a world so near our own, yet so distant.
Without sugar-coating any of its events or sounding a hopeful note that would ring false, Arias offers a conclusion that is colorful and powerful but does not try to blot out the horror that pervades this important and unsettling novel.
AFTER THE BOMBS
By Arturo Arias, translated by Asa Zatz
Curbstone; 221 pages; $ 10.95
Arturo Arias, a Guatemalan writer who lives and teaches in Texas, works a vein of fiction that might be called Death Squad Realism.
Beyond the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American writers, Arias offers a novel piled relentlessly high with dismembered bodies and the stench of death. He loads ''After the Bombs'' with the numbing excess of Guatemala's recent history and offers a sardonic humor that would be unnerving if it did not accurately represent the Guatemalans' reaction to the absurd horror of their lives.
This is a country where political killings have claimed 100,000 lives in the past 20 years; where the CIA has been accused of toppling the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954; where brutal dictatorships have resulted in assassinations of rival politicians in the streets.
Five candidates were assassinated in the period after the 1954 bombing (by coup supporters) of Guatemala City, Arias writes. ''Panic erupted when the news came out. Tranquility returned when it was known that the army candidates had miraculously survived. Smiles reappeared once again on the faces of the grateful populace. Reconstruction forged ahead.''
The novel tells the story of Maximo, who huddles under a desk with his mother to survive the bombing and grows up to be a writer. As a child, Maximo roams the streets of Guatemala City in the dusty quiet after the bombs have finally stopped, inured to death's gargantuan scale. He and other children find a dead bird and give it a proper burial. They dig a hole in the mud and search for beautiful objects:
''Maximo was the last to return. I found a ring, he shouted. A beautiful ring. The circle of children opened to make way for him to come through and place his offering at the dead bird's feet. He was proud of his find. And it really was beautiful. Solid gold with a gorgeous aquamarine in the middle. It was beautiful even with the finger inside it.''
Maximo grows, yearning to know why his father has not been seen since the bombing. He makes friends, learning from Chingolo, an aging intellectual, what it means to be a man of action (Chingolo is not) and from Amarena, a preacher's daughter and prostitute, about the importance of the art of play. He matures, toughens and in the end comes to stand for a modicum of sanity that has been snatched from chaos.
He endures a horrible episode of forced copulation under the prodding of soldiers' guns, robbing him and the American ambassador's daughter of their virginity (they are both 13). Long after the girl, Karen, has retreated to Texas and killed herself, Maximo still sees her face in his dreams and his days.
But Maximo is a survivor. He moves on. He learns more about his country and himself, about the father who was a functionary in the post-revolutionary government that for a time curtailed the power of the army and the oligarchs. In the end, he takes action.
Arias relies too much on intentional sentence fragments and other self-conscious literary devices, and Asa Zatz's translation has some obvious flaws, but this book offers an essential and unforgettable glimpse into a world so near our own, yet so distant.
Without sugar-coating any of its events or sounding a hopeful note that would ring false, Arias offers a conclusion that is colorful and powerful but does not try to blot out the horror that pervades this important and unsettling novel.
May 16, 2008
A remarkably assured first novel. After the bombs renders, in resonant magical realism, the damage done at all levels of Guatemalan society by the 1954 US bombing in protection of corporate interests (that is, United Fruit). Arias juggles horror and humor winningly, and takes us via fantasy to the core of a harsh Central American reality.
July 10, 2009
Without a good sese of Guatemalan history this book would probably be confusing and boring, I´m sure there were some parts to it that were completely over my head. This book was ok, I wasn´t a fan of the beginning of the book but I´m glad I pushed on.
July 29, 2008
a story about a boy growing up in the midst of war in guatemala. a little difficult to read, as there really isnt much proper sentence structure, nor quotation marks. but definitely a wonderful story none the less.
April 30, 2015
Not my favorite. Couldn't get into the chaotic narrative and lack of punctuation, and some of the more brutal scenes were really difficult for me to read.
May 10, 2016
GUATEMALA
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews