Autumn of the Patriarch

My favorite Marquez and high on my all-time list. Like most good prose the book is best read aloud, even sung. Consider that if you read it in English, Gregory Rabassa should share full credit for the beauty of his translation. No reviewer has mentioned the ambiguity of identity which is the central theme of this marvelous story. Early on something happens that leaves a mystery behind. Perhaps you have been mislead. The remainder of the book glitters with clues.

The people who have said this book is difficult probably just weren't prepared for it. This is second only to 100 Years as Garcia's most amazing work. Of course it's challenging. Of course much of the book is atmospheric--that's the point. It's told from the point of view of an entire country, a country that's been raped and starved and brutalized for so long it can barely remember who it is. It's a portrait of a complicated love/hate, co-dependent relationship between a nation and its caudillo. Don't try to read this if you're expecting something light for the plane, and don't read it as your first Garcia Marquez book either. I'd start with Love in the Time of Cholera, then more to 100 Years of Solitude, and then read this a year later, when you finally understand 100 Years. This book demands nearly as much attention and respect as Joyce; be ready to give it.

This is not a novel with a story, though it is a monstrous tale. It is a fantastic description of the rotten guts of tyranny. Enormous, steaming sentences, reeking with exotic images and jaguar tracks contain a sorrowful epic of the surreal politics of hot, underdeveloped places that know more corruption than justice. Weaving in and out, from one person's thoughts to another's, from one time to a second, with almost no dialogue, no conversation, no quotation marks, but moving from the mind of a general to dictator to "the people" to the female love interest and back again, Garcia Marquez spins a horrific story that is unlikely to be similar to anything you have read before. Maybe you will be satisfied to read this as a `one-off' kind of book that demands your total attention, all your powers of imagination and your determination. It is not a simple novel. I realized that Milorad Pavic, the Serbian author of fantastic tales, owes much to Garcia Marquez, sometimes even images (eggs of a certain day, news-spreading parrots).The "Patriarch" is the ur-dictator, the tyrant personified, an old man who never steps down, who rules behind a double whose death thus gives rise to a legend of immortality. The dictator's underlings invent Potemkin everything; his palace is full of cripples, blind people, lepers, and domestic animals; he is a monster who, like all the tyrants he represents, cannot love, but only cultivate power. There is his mother, who failed to be a saint, the dynamited clergyman, the roasted general, the nun-mistress, the murdered children, the wife eaten by dogs. Was there anything he did not violate or corrupt ? Garcia Marquez gives one of the best-written pictures of the corruption of absolute power. The dictator is unnamed, perhaps a composite of Colombians, perhaps more. We find Stalin in him, Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussain. And the reaction of the crowd, the mass, is the same every time. "The only thing that gave us security on earth," they say, "was the certainty that he was there....dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure..." In the end, they mourned him---as Russians did mourn Stalin---despite the massacres, the coups and brutal suppressions, the repression of religion, the selling off of every resource the country had---because they had wound up not knowing what would become of them without him. Brilliant imagery, product of a fantastic imagination, that pours out on the pages, seemingly with endless abundance, can only dazzle a reader. It's a stunning novel whose moral may be that "a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.." The person who understands and exploits this is the most dangerous type of human being. Unfortunately they exist in all countries and have appeared throughout history. THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH is not really a South American,

Beware, those of you who have not read a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book yet! The style and literary techniques employed by the venerable author here are not, at first, user-friendly. In place of a sequence of actions, a run-on assault of descriptions tell the tale of a seemingly immortal yet completely despicable Caribbean tyrant. Sentences last for pages, each chapter is but one paragraph, the narrative perspective changes in mid-sentence, etc: This anti-traditional approach proves to be extremely rewarding, I felt the ending was even better than the build-up. Worthy of a score of Doctorate theses--but none by my hand. Upon finishing this book you will be awakened to a unique artistic literary style by one of the century's greatest authors--then go out and buy yourself some more Marquez novels. The more straightforward "General in his Labyrinth" and the illustrious "100 Years of Solitude" I also highly recommend.

Garcia-Marquez dictator combines within himself, the best and the worst, of the human being when invested with absolute power: from charity to corruption, benevolence to rape, fear of God to extreme cruelty. The (sparse) punctuation follows an almost strict fitting of the Poisson statistical distribution, page by page, and then amongst chapters, constituting this into both a textbook in literature and statistics. To some of us the most masterful novel of the Master Novelist of Meridian America.