The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1975)

The fever dream life of a disfigured and brutal dictator who ruled his Caribbean nation longer than memory.

Classics Review: The Autumn of the Patriarch is a tour de force, an event, an experience that demands much from its reader. But worth it. An epic poem, a vast history of post-colonial America, an insight of depravity made whole. This is not a book with plot and story, order and logic. It's a bombardment and derangement of the senses where all times occur at the same time, where one's memories of several lifetimes exist at once, where one experiences past, present, and future indistinguishably. All of which is related in a rhythmic, unrelenting, torrent of words, so many words, too many words, words in sentences that go on for pages, paragraphs that last for days, where yet another half-caught evocative phrase spins by, barely registering before the next is spun right at your face. Not all readers will be strong enough for everything here. A single mind can't hold all this, the whole history of a people, the collective conscious and unconscious of a continent. There's no way to keep it all in mind, to take hold of one page before being lost in the next. Until the reader is overwhelmed by this deluge of image and must step back, step away, step off. The Autumn of the Patriarch is like a thousand mile journey through mountains. Each mile one sees majestic peaks, breathtaking views, unique and awe-inspiring sights, for mile and after mile, and after awhile it is yet another amazing peak, view, and sight -- a thousand times. Who can keep all that in mind, remember every mile, gather all that has been seen. That is this novel. What García Márquez is creating is not a story but an accretion of the masks and impressions of a myth, a myth that no two people remember the same way, of memories that have faded and shifted till no one is certain what was real and what was imagined. The Autumn of the Patriarch is the myth of a post-colonial world, for that's what we're left with. "They turned our artists into fairies, they brought the Bible and syphilis, they made people believe that life was easy ... that everything is gotten with money, that blacks carry contagion." A continent where everything that was old, original, that grew up through the feet, that was built on language and lore, was abruptly destroyed, replaced by a different people who made this country into a fun-house, distorted-mirror version of their own. All built on cruelty, arrogance, and indifference. Then they left (or were driven out) with no single real thing left behind. A few centuries of chaos: unfinished structure, half-built tradition, borrowed heritage, imposed memories, false history, a mixed people. A language sewn onto tongues. The very same language that García Márquez uses so well to create this phantasm of the past that lives in the present and contorts the future. The Autumn of the Patriarch is written like the nightmare of a drunken sleepwalker because there is no other way to tell the story.  [5★]