The Autumn of the Patriarch

The best thing about Autumn of the Patriarch is its title.  I like the idea of the title.  It’s been sitting (very aptly) next to Everyday Sexism on my bedside cabinet and stirring up my hopes.  Unfortunately, the book itself left me less hopeful for a misandrically matriarchal utopia.  Yes I know- not all men!

The book itself is about the death of a despotic dictator; a man so enshrouded in lies and the Cult of Personality that it is impossible to discern the lies from the legend.  Supposedly (thank you once more Wikipedia), the fact that each sentence is roughly ten pages long feeds into this, making it difficult to distinguish between words and thoughts and deeds.  It does.  It also makes it really hard to read and even more so to care.  Now I know I’ve banged on about how much I value proper punctuation previously: more than once.  Not even Nobel Prize winners are going to change my mind on this.  In fact, I’m pretty sure James Joyce has a Nobel Prize and he’s chiefly to blame.  Each chapter of Gabriel García Márquez’s book is an intimidating 40-odd page behemoth of a paragraph.  Reading any chapter is a real commitment and concentrating through the whole thing is a challenge.  To be fair, it would have probably been easier it I hadn’t been reading it while watching The Mummy Returns for the umpteenth time.  It’s really not the kind of book you can half-arse.

Another reason I think I missed something from the novel is that I know nothing about its context.  Aside from Stalin and Hitler, the dictators I know things about are the ones that came after the book was released- people like Colonel Gaddafi and Kim Jong-il.  My knowledge of the international politics in the 1960s and 70s is pretty limited to the Vietnam War.  And even Richard Nixon wasn’t that bad.  I think it’s a case of if I knew more about historical figures, like Franco, who are represented in the book I would be able to relate to it more closely.  It’s not a failing by García Márquez, just a case of poor timing.  If I were twenty years older, I’m sure I’d get the book far better.

Naturally, there were bits of the book that I did like.  García Márquez had an extraordinary turn of phrase at times.  My favourite, by far is, “after so many long years of sterile illusions he had begun to glimpse that one doesn’t live, God damn it, he lives through, he survives, one learns too late that even the broadest and most useful of lives only reach the point of learning how to live.”  It’s maybe not the most cheerful of thoughts to end on, but what else can you expect from a novel about a tyrannical dictator?

I’ve now moved on to The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway.  It has paragraphs.