Word: garcias
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...GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ...
...first words of The Autumn of the Patriarch, and what a way to begin a novel: the theme is artfully insinuated, an atmosphere instantly evoked like a puff of stage smoke, and all conveyed in language that generates a charge of expectancy. Admirers of Colombian Novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez have come to expect such virtuosity. His One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) is a flat-out masterpiece...
With his fictional Colombian town of Macondo, Garcia Márquez created a Latin American Yoknapatawpha in which grubby fact and mythological fantasy mingled into what can loosely be called magic realism. His new novel is a more circumscribed, grimmer and more obscure work. Its setting-mainly the presidential palace of a nameless South American country-shows a little less Faulkner and a little more Kafka. The Castle, with a high temperature-humidity index, comes to mind...
Power of Illusion. The general even finds a perfect double to appear in public for him. When the double is assassinated, the dictator in effect attends his own funeral where, Garcia Márquez writes, "he saw with a hidden uneasiness those who had only come to decipher the enigma of whether it really was or was not he ..." He soon sets them straight and, like Francisco Franco, seems to go on forever, despite rumors of failing health and imminent demise. Even when he really is found dead, the people cannot be sure...
...true anecdotes about South American dictators that he could find, though, he adds, he purposely forgot them all before he put words on paper. Nevertheless, his portrait of the general seems uncannily true to life as well as to art; and it is precisely the vividness of Garcia Marquez' vision that makes his book so frightening, sad, funny, immediate...