Word: patriarchal
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...AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH...
These are the 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...
Kaufman and Ferber have embodied--but never too seriously--this peculiar blend of love and commitment in the figure of the late Aubrey Cavendish, the patriarch of this royal family of the theater, whose portrait hangs high on the wall in the Cavendish living room. The great Aubrey Cavendish never quit. He allowed himself time off from his work only once in his life, after finishing the last performance of his last tour, which was ending that night. He did all four curtain calls and only when the curtain had dropped for the last time did he allow himself...
...patriarch admits to death his incapacity for the love "we," the people he commands, represent. His efforts to fill that void with the solitary vice of power only produced hollow lies, he admits at the last; cardboard constructions which "we," the people of everyday, soon learned to walk around and ignore, leaving him to act alone on the set built of his barren lust...
...patriarch's autumn ends, he dies, we the crowd rejoice. Politically, socially, Marquez' ending might seem naive. The bureaucracy that will replace the general will be no better. But the book's politics, like its language or imagery, transcend such judgment. Like the Iliad or the Tain. Autumn is so epically true it is unjudgeable. The patriarch is so immense, so all-encompassing, that though mortal, he becomes a fact of nature. And how can an ocean, or a season, be condemned for the death it causes...