Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Lie is More Useful than Love, June 29, 2002
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, magico-realist novel, though it is that. It is a painting of the human tragedy.
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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Works for me., February 27, 2003
It's inevitable that this book should be somewhat off-putting compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera--Autumn of the Patriarch isn't really meant to be a 'pleasant' read. It is a grim portrait of the title character, and other characters come and go without having inner lives of their own; they have relevance only insofar as they intersect with his life. It is without a doubt one of the least novelistic novels you will ever read--indeed, in many ways it's more like a prolonged character study than a novel.Some people complain about the style in which the book is written--no paragraph breaks, few chapter breaks, long run-on sentences (the final chapter--fifty pages or so--is one massive sentence), perspective shifts mid-sentence and even mid-clause--but the truth of the matter is that, although this can become a little bit wearing at times, it is by no means 'difficult.' Not in the sense that Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, and Absalom, Absalom! are difficult. It can occasionally be disorienting, but in general it's always pretty easy to tell what's going on, and the style results in a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere that, I think, is perfect for describing the General's long, nightmarish reign. Sure, it could have been written in a more conventional style, and it could well have still been a good book, but Garcia Marquez's decision to push narrative boundaries provides just the right feel. After all, the General is a composite of many Meso and South American tyrants, and to couch his reign in more concrete, everyday terms would have taken away some of his universality (his selling of the Caribbean is a clear demonstration of this, as well as one of the most striking literary metaphors you'll ever encounter). He isn't really a human being; he's an implacable, negative force. For all his flailing around, occasionally making half-hearted and futile efforts to change, his life ultimately has no other meaning. Autumn of the Patriarch certainly isn't the best of Garcia Marquez's movels to start with (that would be One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course), but it's an important part of his oeuvre, even if it's not as 'fun.' I recommend it to literate people everywhere.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
García Márquez Magically Captures the Mind of a Dictator, November 20, 1999
By A Customer
In his second novel, Gabriel García Márquez reinvents himself in the wonderful work of "Autumn of the Patriarch". The work took him 8 years to write, however the result was well worth the work. By using a stream of consiousness technique and constantly altering between first and third persons, García Márquez exhibits his techincal mastery. He transplants the reader into the mind and world of a dictator in an unnamed Latin American country. García Márquez really captures the mind and spirit of this solitary power. An important reading for understanding power in Latin America. Similar books include "Senor Presidente" by Miguel Angel Asturias and "Reasons of State" by Alejo Carpentier. This novel is particularly relevant with the circumstances surrounding ex-Chilean Dictator, Augusto Pinochet.
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