The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Caribbean Bates Motel

Perhaps one of the longest sustained rants in literary history. Certainly an anti-dictatorial polemic which spares the reader nothing of the disadvantages of uncontrolled power - torture, arbitrary execution, sadism, and a general lack of good taste. Even if the dictator in question does love his mother.

The United States of course is the catalytic force for the dictatorial regime and its flaws. Well sort of, since one could hardly insist that previous governments were better in any discernible sense. Marquez implies that there is an underlying problem of unwillingness to be governed which would have led to the same state regardless of foreign meddling. The country resembles the Roman Empire in its declining years - the buck stops with local war lords who keep most of it and distribute the rest as loose change.

Perhaps the real culprit is mother. She was a peasant after all, with all the banal proclivities of the peasantry, “lamenting to anyone who wanted to listen to her that it was no good being the president's mama.” She encouraged the dictator to believe in “the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male and of having received in a dream the hermetical keys to his messianic destiny,” Of course she chooses not to acknowledge his grotesque sexual appetites when she sees him “wallowing in the fen of prosperity.” Poor boy never had any real discipline.

The problem presented by Marquez to the reader is that without extensive knowledge of Colombian (and more general Latin America) history, Autumn of the Patriarch reads, like an old Norse saga, as a endless series of awful lives, more awful assassinations and massacres, and dissipating palace intrigues. Perhaps that is how he perceives Colombian history in a nutshell: a repetitive cycle of corrupt generals who maintain a permanent state of incipient war and pervasive squalor. Not something for the tourist brochures then.

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