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The Autumn of the Patriarch

Gabriel García Márquez

Start date: October 1, 2021

Finish date: November 22, 2021

Discussion: AUTHORITARIANISM GGM STYLE

Why we're reading this: This is not an easy read, yet it is the work that prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered …more
[close] This is not an easy read, yet it is the work that prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered his most notable. Dealing with the rule of a sort of Arch-dictator, Garcia Marquez uses Magical Realism and surreal symbolism in his critique of Authoritarianism.

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AUTHORITARIANISM GGM STYLE

Autumn of the Patriarch: Chapters 3 and 4
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last updated Dec 30, 2021 02:15PM

The Autumn of the Patriarch - Opening impressions
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Sep 20, 2013 Paul rated it really liked it

This is Garcia Marquez at his most complex and polemical. It is an uncomfortable read, disturbing at times. It is also difficult with very few chapters, no paragraphs and sentences that go on for several pages. Garcia Marquez conducts an extended love affair with the comma; his punctuation mark of choice in this book.
The novel concerns the nameless dictator of a nameless Caribbean nation; principally it is the story of his decline and death with added detail concerning his bloody reign. He has This is Garcia Marquez at his most complex and polemical. It is an uncomfortable read, disturbing at times. It is also difficult with very few chapters, no paragraphs and sentences that go on for several pages. Garcia Marquez conducts an extended love affair with the comma; his punctuation mark of choice in this book.
The novel concerns the nameless dictator of a nameless Caribbean nation; principally it is the story of his decline and death with added detail concerning his bloody reign. He has modestly titled himself “General of the Universe”. Garcia Marquez does have experience of living under dictatorship (Pinilla in Columbia and Franco in Spain).
It is a mass of influences that hits you like a torrent of water. As you would expect there is magic realism and surrealism at its heart. However the influence of Rabelais is also clear and there is a strand of mysticism running through it all. The jumps in time are reminiscent of Faulkner. It is also crude, vulgar, violent and cruel as you would expect of any analysis of the internal dynamics of dictatorship.
There are also some deeply comic moments. The dictator sells the sea around his island to the Americans who keep him in power. The sea is packaged up and sent to somewhere in Arizona; the general is given a wind machine as a present to replace the sea breezes. The cows on the island are born with the presidential mark already on them.
However, the novel is deeply depressing, polemical and focuses on excess. The General is a grotesque and the excesses are completely over the top, even though there is a dreamlike quality even to the violence and perversions. Garcia Marquez captures the chaos and unknowing of life in a dictatorship; there is little sense of time (the General changes it at will), memories are changed at will and reinvented. The atrocities are trotted out and explained by the General. We spend a great deal of time in the General’s head and Garcia Marquez exposes what one reviewer has called “the solitary vice of power”. The General comes to see himself as a god and names his son Emmanuel.
This is a fascinating, confusing, shocking and mystical analysis of the heart of dictatorship and the heart of a dictator; charting his decline from charismatic leader to depraved beast. ...more

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Sep 01, 2019 Nandakishore Mridula rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city woke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

Thus begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez's acclaimed novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about the life and death of the dictator in an unnamed Latin American country. This first

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city woke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

Thus begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez's acclaimed novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about the life and death of the dictator in an unnamed Latin American country. This first sentence tells us clearly what to expect in this story: as the time starts moving, slowly, sluggishly out of the presidential palace where it has been imprisoned for centuries, we are invited to dip into its muddy waters which contain fragrance and filth not in equal amounts, the filth dominating; yet by willing ourselves to endure it, we can still take nutrition hidden in its whorls and eddies.

But as time unravels, it would be foolish to expect it to be linear. And also, as the hoary past has been pent up for aeons in a timeless receptacle, it would futile to expect "truth" also. For what is truth, other than what we perceive through our senses, those lying blackguards whose main aim to filter information to limit it to the bare minimum we need for survival? No, here we are in the realm of myth, so dive in folks, prepare to get smothered, gasp for breath, imbibe filthy waters, drown yourself and resurrect unexpectedly: it's not an easy journey, it's not even enjoyable sometimes, but it's compelling, and once you are in, it's not easy to come out until all the years have unravelled and you are left alone on the unstoried beach of desolation.

The author does not tell you whether the Patriarch is an actual flesh and blood person who existed, oh no, it is impossible and more important, immaterial: what is essential is for us readers, once we enter the palace with its courtyard of lepers beneath the rosebushes and the cows wandering on the stairs and the chickens roosting in the royal chambers and the birds of paradise creating immense cacophony in their cages and his innumerable concubines with their seven-month runts is to reach the room where the great man is lying dead face down with his right arm as a pillow, turn him over, look into his wizened visage and his skeletal finger wearing the ring of authority and his herniated testicle and transport ourselves to the timeless era of his reign: from his birth as a no-account orphan to the bird-woman Benedicion Alvorado later consecrated as saint, his double Patricio Aragones murdered in his stead, his henchmen who draw, quarter, skin and through various other cruel means dispatch his suspected enemies before they are murdered in much more barbarous fashion themselves, the novice Letitia Nazareno kidnapped and kept captive naked for years before she becomes first lady and is murdered, the beauty queen Manuela Sanchez who apparently moves through walls. Oh yes, that is what we are supposed to do, float, swim, dive drown, resuscitate. No questions. Most important: no questions, no analysis, no asking: what does it all mean anyway?, oh no: just lose yourself.

For this is not the tale of the Patriarch, when you look at it deeply, it is the tale of all such patriarchs who lived the "...ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority...": when they get past the spring of their youth and the high noon of their summer and enter the autumn of their dotage, when the leaves of their authority start to fall, we have to brace ourselves for the long, hopeless winter that follows. Let's only hope that it will not be a Nuclear Winter!

Note: This is a very tough read, though I found it exhilarating. ...more

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Apr 02, 2016 Meem Arafat Manab rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, favourites-2016

আমি জানি না, আমার ব্যক্তিগত জীবন যেটা, সেটারে নিয়ে খুশি হওয়া উচিত কী না, এই যে কোনো পিছুটান নাই, কোনো দৌঁড় নাই, কিছু করি না, করতে হয় না আমার, ফুটা পয়সাও না কামাইলে চলে, এখনো বাপেরটা খাই, পড়ি, বই পড়ি এছাড়াও, এই একটা কাজ ধরেবেঁধে করি, আর কিছু, না, আর লোকেরে বলি যে লেখা দরকার, আমার ত খুশি হওয়া উচিত মনে হয়, এরকম একটা জীবন কী আমি সারাজীবন চেয়ে আসি নাই!

এইসবের সাথে অবশ্য অটাম অফ দা প্যাট্রিয়ার্কের তেমন সম্পর্ক নাই। অটাম অফ দা প্যাট্রিয়ার্ক, সলিচিউডের পরপর লেখা, সলিচিউডের চেয়ে ভয়ংকর বললেও আমি জানি না, আমার ব্যক্তিগত জীবন যেটা, সেটারে নিয়ে খুশি হওয়া উচিত কী না, এই যে কোনো পিছুটান নাই, কোনো দৌঁড় নাই, কিছু করি না, করতে হয় না আমার, ফুটা পয়সাও না কামাইলে চলে, এখনো বাপেরটা খাই, পড়ি, বই পড়ি এছাড়াও, এই একটা কাজ ধরেবেঁধে করি, আর কিছু, না, আর লোকেরে বলি যে লেখা দরকার, আমার ত খুশি হওয়া উচিত মনে হয়, এরকম একটা জীবন কী আমি সারাজীবন চেয়ে আসি নাই!

এইসবের সাথে অবশ্য অটাম অফ দা প্যাট্রিয়ার্কের তেমন সম্পর্ক নাই। অটাম অফ দা প্যাট্রিয়ার্ক, সলিচিউডের পরপর লেখা, সলিচিউডের চেয়ে ভয়ংকর বললেও মনে হয় খুব বেশি রং চড়ে না এর গায়। অদ্ভূত সব ঘটনা ঘটতে থাকে, মার্কেজ যেমন ঘটায়, এবং মার্কেজের পরের দিকের লেখাগুলির মতন না, অনেক বেশি ফিকির করছেন তিনি এখানে, একেকটা আমি এখানে একেকটা মানুষ, সাড়ে সাতশো মানুষের মাথার ভেতর থেকে ঘুরায়ে আনে এই বই। দুর্বোধ্য ত না ঠিক, স্রেফ মাথাটা খেয়ে দেয় আর কী।
অনেক কিছু ঘটে, অনেক কয়টা নারী, মার্কেজের অন্যান্য বইয়ে থাকে যেমন, অনেকগুলি গোরু, ক্যারিবীয় সাগর, আরবীয় বাজার, আরো কী কী যেনো, আল্লাহ। আমি একটা পর্যায়ে গিয়ে আরেকটা বই হাতে নিয়ে ফেলছিলাম!
ইন্টারনেটে দেখলাম, কে যেনো এই বইয়ের মূল চরিত্রের সাথে এরশাদের তুলনা টানছেন, সম্ভবত বইটার যিনি বাংলা অনুবাদ করছেন তিনিই। দুইজনেই জেনারেল বলে মনে হয়। আমার অবশ্য বইয়ের জেনারেল সাহাবরে পুরাপুরিই আলাদা মনে হইছে। বরং মনে হইছে তারে বিভিন্ন দেশের জাতির জনকদের মতন। বিভিন্ন দেশের।
যাদের সেই রাতে পূর্ণিমা ছিলো ভাল্লাগছে, যাদের মার্কেজ ভালো লাগে, যাদের হাতে অনেক সময়। তাদের ভাল্লাগবে মনে হয়। শিওর হইতে পারি না।

এখন কী করবো বুঝতেছি না। যেই কয়টা মার্কেজ পড়ছি, তার অর্দ্ধেক পড়তে গিয়ে মাথার উপর দিয়ে বাজে রকমের চাপ গেছে। এইটাও। ত হ্যাঁ, এখন কী করবো, জানি না, আর কিছু পড়বো হয়ত, আর ত কিছু করা হয় না, কতদিন সিনেমা দেখি না। আর কী কী যেনো করতাম আগে, মনে আসে না।
ভুলে যাই শবনম। ...more

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Jan 30, 2019 Linda rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: boston-book-club, latin-american

I think the low rating is due to a confluence of factors: GM's attempt at neo-Baroque (not his forte), combined with redundancy, plus the time factor (over due ILL book). I'll re-read it at a future date and it will probably go up; my head just wasn't in the right place for reading a repetitive composite study of Latin American dictators where sentences go on for pages, and a paragraph constitutes the entire chapter. Just a bit much at the wrong time. ...more

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