Description

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's follow-up novel to his internationally acclaimed ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is the lushly surreal, brilliantly grotesque portrait of an unnamed Caribbean dictator who has dubbed himself "the General of the Universe." A masterful apotheosis of such leaders as Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gomez, Colombia's Rojas Pinilla, Francisco Franco, Rafael Trujillo, and the long line of military strongmen dating back to Julius Caesar, the novel was one Garcia Marquez dreamed of writing since his early days as a political journalist, and one that--with its visionary depiction of the unreality of Latin American life, and it's nightmarish understanding of the corruption of power--perhaps only Garcia Marquez could have written. The General is a man of freakish proportions and hideous deformities who lives for centuries, sires and murders thousands of children, always wins his country's lottery, and sells his country's ocean to a corporation in the United States. As outlandish and violent as The Arabian Nights, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIACH is a fever dream of power and politics gone mad, and Garcia Marquez's magical realism simultaneously exults in the impossible even as it somehow conveys the hideous nature of the truth.