The Autumn of the Patriarch

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"The Autumn of the Patriarch" is an encyclopedia teeming with the songs and melodies of the Colombian coast, its animals and plants, its oddities and tragedies, its illusory love stories and bloody realities, its magic and spells, its feasts of marinated human flesh, and a sea sold in numbered pieces. It is a terrifying novel in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez transcends the borders of Latin America, and an omnipresent dictator declares war on all his rivals, from children to the Papal See in Rome... where, at the height of his autumn, he says, "I live... my victims die": children and opponents, clerics and rebels, Indians and Hindus, Arabs and other oppressed people. "I live," he says. Yet, in the end, he finds himself face to face with death in magnificent pages where Marquez intensifies the other side of life, the life that the patriarch only saw from behind, before the immense time of eternity ended, and before the bells of joy rang and the melodies of liberation rose. From the patriarch's childhood to his assumption of power, or, conversely, from his assumption of power to his early childhood, which we discover integrated and synchronized with his second childhood, according to the sequence and intertwining of events in the novel, there is a closed time that is the space in which the events of this magnificent Marquez novel unfold. A closed circular movement and an astonishing anthem against dictatorship, in a style that combines poetry, music, and cinematic script.