The Autumn of the Patriarch

Description

“The Autumn of the Patriarch” is an encyclopedia teeming with the songs and melodies of the Colombian coast, its animals and herbs, its humor and tragedies, tales of illusory love and bloody realities, magic and spells, feasts of marinated human flesh, and a sea sold in numbered lots. A terrifying novel in which Gabriel García Márquez transcends the boundaries of Latin America, a tyrant with an all-powerful presence declares war on all his rivals, from children to the Papacy in Rome… where, at the height of his reign, he proclaims, “I live…” His victims die: children and dissidents, clergy and rebels, Indians and Hindus, Arabs and other persecuted peoples. “I live,” he says. However, in the end, he finds himself face to face with death in magnificent pages where Márquez intensifies the other side of life, the life the patriarch only saw from behind, before the immense era of eternity ended, before the bells of joy rang and the melodies of liberation rose. From the patriarch’s childhood to his rise to power, or, conversely, from his rise to power to his first childhood, which we come to know as intertwined and simultaneous with his second, according to the sequence and interweaving of events in the novel, there is a closed time frame—the space within which the events of this magnificent Márquez unfold. A closed circular movement and a stunning ode against dictatorship, in a style that combines poetry, music, and cinematic screenplay.