Description:
Government is the first installment of B. Traven's legendary Jungle Novels, a series of six books detailing the oppression and subsequent uprising of the Mexican Revolution.
Don Gabriel arrives in a remote village as the embodiment of the government, a minor bureaucrat assigned to oversee an isolated outpost at the edge of the Mexican Revolution. His task is brutal and routine. He organizes the capture and transport of Indigenous villagers to forced labor on mahogany plantations owned by foreign investors. Around him, officials posture and command, while power reveals itself as something hollow, sustained by fear and habit. As tensions rise, obedience gives way to defiance, and the fragile order imposed by the state begins to crack. Moving with quiet intensity toward a violent and inevitable reckoning, Government lays bare the collision between authority and humanity, illusion and truth, in a stark and enduring portrait of power at its most corrosive.Brief description: B. Traven (1882-1969) was a pen name of one of the most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. The life and work of the author, whose other aliases include Hal Croves, Traven Torsvan, and Ret Marut, has been called "the greatest literary mystery of the twentieth century." Of German descent and Mexican nationality, he has sold more than thirty million books, in more than thirty languages. Films of his work include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which won three Oscars; Macario, the first Mexican film to be nominated for an Oscar; and The Death Ship, a cult classic in Germany.