Word: garcias
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...novels, however, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," by Robert Pirsig, both published two years ago, appear to have stood the test of time...
...Garcia Marquez may disappoint those who are looking for The Return of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Instead of creating a swarm of characters, he has really animated only the Patriarch, whose monologue distills all other voices. And rather than using his blunt, ironic prose, he has fashioned an elaborate rhetoric that washes everything into a flow of phrases and thoughts...
...Hundred Years, a kernel of reality lies in the Patriarch's story. Garcia Marquez says that he learned everything he could about actual dictators, then forgot it all in order to write the novel. The Patriarch ages, contemptibly deaf and senile, gradually cut off from authority by bureaucrats who preserve him as a useful relic. He caricatures Franco propped up by his bodyguards in motorcades and at podiums, or the pathetic fake photograph of Mao swimming in the Yangtze River. His solitariness is the loneliness of power taken to its extreme and most human degree...
Linked to the Patriarch's slipping are the tropics continually decaying: dusty palms, the band playing on Sundays in the park, the abandoned American cruiser rusting at its dock. The brilliant fantasy of Garcia Marquez's details exorcizes tropical nostalgia, and makes The Autumn of the Patriarch the rarest novel to appear this year...
...case in most of his other novels, Garcia Márquez offers very lit tle chronological plotting. The Autumn of the Patriarch actually begins at the end of the general's life and works back ward and laterally through a national history that somewhat resembles the blur of civil wars and chaos in the au thor's own Colombia. Garcia Márquez writes with what could be called a stream-of-consciousness technique, but the result is much more like a whirl pool. Events, characters and dialogue are all sucked down into a powerful nar rative vortex...