The Autumn of the Patriarch (Picador Books)

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author), G. Rabassa (Translator)

• Used

  Paperback
  1978

  $3.69

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $4.29

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude , explores the loneliness of power in Autumn of the Patriarch . Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside. As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their arrogant, manically violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal? Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lives have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Marquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality. Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its total originality. ( Vogue ). Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator. ( Guardian ). Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do. (Salman Rushdie). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include Bon Voyage Mr.President , Chronicle of a Death Foretold , Collected Stories , The General in his Labyrinth , In the Evil Hour , Innocent Erendira and Other Stories , Leaf Storm , Living to Tell the Tale , Love in the Time of Cholera , Memories of Melancholy Whores , News of a Kidnapping , No-one Writes to the Colonel , Of Love and Other Demons , The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and Strange Pilgrims .

• Used

  Hardcover
  1991

  $23.11

  First the vultures arrive. Then the revolutionaries burst into the crumbling presidential palace of a modern Latin American country to find the rotting corpse of the dictator whose shadow has loomed over the advancing corruption of their country for almost a century. There was a time when his power seemed to have no limit, when dauntless adulators proclaimed him corrector of earthquakes and other errors of God, when his messianistic appearances among the peasants inspired awe and love. But as his infamous regime tightened its grip of cruelty and terror, the dictator himself became afraid, withdrawing into the sanctuary of his crowded palace, where the ministers, concubines and tribes of children he surrounded himself with could not offset the loneliness of the autumn of his power - the autumn of his pain. Gabriel Garcia Marquez weaves a narrative backwards and forwards through time, telling the story of the despot general - lover and son, puppet and symbol, man and monster - through the eyes of those who adored and served him, of those who feared and despised him.