Jessie's review
The Autumn of the Patriarch (P.S.)
by Gabriel García Márquez
I remember at one point, while reading this, sitting straight up and saying "dude just sold the sea!" Has to be one of the most outrageous moments in literature. For me this is a 5 star book, and one of the most important novels of the last century. But it is difficult. The stream of consciousness thing -- Marquez was hugely influenced by William Faulkner (Mr. Stream of Consciousness himself). I think you did a great job wrestling with this novel, and then explaining what that experience was like. Btw, here's a link to a Washington Post article on this book that you may want to read. Yardley is a great reviewer, and this piece pushed me into reading the novel.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
hey, thanks! i'm glad to hear someone else's point of view. it was definitely a reading experience that made me question whether or not i understood anything about literature. i'll check out the article and get back to you. what else have you read by him? i'm thinking of moving on to "Leaf Storm" now.
The only other one I ever read by GM was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I thought was so-so, and is pretty pale when compared to Autumn of the P. The book that put him on the map was One Hundred Years in Solitude, but for some reason I've never been able to get into that book. (I have good friends with very good judgment in Literature who rave about that one being special.) There is one book by a South American I would however recommend (and it's not such a chore to read), The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. The storytelling is much more like a regular novel, and it's also a great story. And one based upon real events.
interesting digression:
"The reader may have noted that among those despots to the south who served as the author's models, two are conspicuously missing: Juan Peron and Fidel Castro. The explanation for this is simple -- Garcia Marquez is a man of the left -- but it makes the author vulnerable to charges of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy. A year ago a journalist named Jorge Ramos wrote in the Miami Herald that it is "difficult to believe" that the novel was based on Pinochet rather than Castro, though he acknowledged that in the mid-1970s Castro "still could dazzle and dupe writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic." This complaint, often expressed within the Cuban exile community, has merit: A tyrant is a tyrant no matter his ostensible political convictions, after all, and the picture of Garcia Marquez cozying up to Castro -- to the extent of living for long periods in Cuba and serving as de facto counselor to El Presidente -- is not exactly edifying."
Jessie's review
The Autumn of the Patriarch (P.S.) by Gabriel García Márquez
Jessie's review
rating:
bookshelves:
currently-reading
recommended for: ryan golden
on the whole, the novel is impressive. i can't imagine what it took for him to write this whole thing the way that he did. most of the sentences run for ten pages, moving from one point-of-view to another without warning, from dreams to real-life (maybe?)action. at the beginning of each chapter, we are reminded that the patriarch of the novel's title is dead, but we are quickly taken back to years before his death and pushed through memories of the years leading up to his first fake and then real death. it certainly makes your head spin, and it's difficult to read less than 40 pages at a time without completely losing track of what the hell is going on.
his technique of using one event as the touchstone from which he begins each section of the book, in this one the death of the patriarch, is common for marquez, but this stream-of-consciousness style of writing is not. what makes it more intriguing is how any given sentence switches from the 1st- to the 3rd-person point-of-view, and ...more
his technique of using one event as the touchstone from which he begins each section of the book, in this one the death of the patriarch, is common for marquez, but this stream-of-consciousness style of writing is not. what makes it more intriguing is how any given sentence switches from the 1st- to the 3rd-person point-of-view, and ...more
I remember at one point, while reading this, sitting straight up and saying "dude just sold the sea!" Has to be one of the most outrageous moments in literature. For me this is a 5 star book, and one of the most important novels of the last century. But it is difficult. The stream of consciousness thing -- Marquez was hugely influenced by William Faulkner (Mr. Stream of Consciousness himself). I think you did a great job wrestling with this novel, and then explaining what that experience was like. Btw, here's a link to a Washington Post article on this book that you may want to read. Yardley is a great reviewer, and this piece pushed me into reading the novel.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
hey, thanks! i'm glad to hear someone else's point of view. it was definitely a reading experience that made me question whether or not i understood anything about literature. i'll check out the article and get back to you. what else have you read by him? i'm thinking of moving on to "Leaf Storm" now.
The only other one I ever read by GM was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I thought was so-so, and is pretty pale when compared to Autumn of the P. The book that put him on the map was One Hundred Years in Solitude, but for some reason I've never been able to get into that book. (I have good friends with very good judgment in Literature who rave about that one being special.) There is one book by a South American I would however recommend (and it's not such a chore to read), The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. The storytelling is much more like a regular novel, and it's also a great story. And one based upon real events.
interesting digression:"The reader may have noted that among those despots to the south who served as the author's models, two are conspicuously missing: Juan Peron and Fidel Castro. The explanation for this is simple -- Garcia Marquez is a man of the left -- but it makes the author vulnerable to charges of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy. A year ago a journalist named Jorge Ramos wrote in the Miami Herald that it is "difficult to believe" that the novel was based on Pinochet rather than Castro, though he acknowledged that in the mid-1970s Castro "still could dazzle and dupe writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic." This complaint, often expressed within the Cuban exile community, has merit: A tyrant is a tyrant no matter his ostensible political convictions, after all, and the picture of Garcia Marquez cozying up to Castro -- to the extent of living for long periods in Cuba and serving as de facto counselor to El Presidente -- is not exactly edifying."
