Word: autumnal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first ten words of The Autumn of the Patriarch announce that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written another novel of the epic dimensions and otherworldly imagination of A Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez' narrative is as ordinary yet startling as the seasons. The shaping powers of Autumn introduce themselves in the first sentence of the book as effortlessly as in nature: Time--arrested, slowed, kneaded by memory and chance, centuries disturbed like dust, recalled like a dream; Power--huge, inevitable, mysterious even to its wielder; Death--arriving at an unex-pected moment, as a carrion bird or in a penitent...
...protagonist of Autumn, a patriarch who is all South American dictators compounded into one, shuffles with his flat feet "like a senile elephant" through his declining years, remembering all that he has sown and reaped, left untouched or blighted. We watch his powers slowly rot over seemingly endless time, and plow with him through strata of recalled events...
READING THIS BOOK is like walking in the dead leaves of an exotic and melancholy autumn. We turn up wet, brown mush, corpses, earthworms, faded brilliance and potential fertility. What we find is sometimes unrecognizable, as is the truth about Marquez' general. His past is buried under so many falsehoods of his own and others' making that all we know of him is the myth...
...images in Autumn form brilliant thematic patterns. In the first chapter we see unforgettably "dead craters of harsh moon ash on the endless plain where the sea had been," we hear "a disaster of hoofs and animal sighs from behind the fortified walls," we smell "the lunar dust-covered rosebuds under which the lepers had slept." Such descriptions return to haunt us, as they do the patriarch; they are fragments of a real or created past, the whole of which we do not know and he has forgotten...
...prevailing mood of this play is that of a fitful breeze stirring faded autumn leaves. Its central figure is an old woman (Mildred Dunnock) haunted by her impending death. She ruminates on many things and, like the play itself, comes to grips with none. Known only as "The Mother," she talks of old age, of passions spent and love unrequited, of parenthood and the serpents' teeth of thankless children. Since the play was originally written some 20 years ago by French Novelist, Dramatist and Film Writer Duras, it is very much in the theater-of-the-absurd tradition...