Word: rquez
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Garcia Márquez's women are magnificent. Stern, stoic, preserved by duty and the dynastic urge, they struggle to keep their men sane. The primal mother Ursula, even at the age of 100, is so sure of her ways that no one realizes she is blind...
...range and length, the book is satisfyingly cohesive where it might be sprawling. The key to this unity is Garcia Márquez's treatment of time. Consider the superb opening sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Such compression of time makes the novel taut with a sense of fate. Atavistic dictates of blood must be followed. Premonitions invariably come true. A series of coded predictions, written when Macondo was still young, are deciphered only when every prediction...