Autumn Of The Patriarch
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Awards: Nobel Winner 1976, PEN/Translation Winner 1977
Nomination: National Book Award Finalist 1977, NY Times Finalist 1976
Date Read: January 28, 2023
Autumn Of The Patriarch is an ode to the solitude of power. Marquez wrote this novel after the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez fled from the country, a person Marquez became especially fascinated by. The Patriarch in this novel is an amalgamation of South American dictators in general, their ability to cling to power in the most brutal means and how isolating absolute power is.
The book isn’t so much a novel as it is a series of vignettes about the life of a despot, a solitary man wandering idly in a huge palace, living a life of mythic proportions – living for over 200 years, fathering 5,000 children, growing a third set of teeth at 150. Although he has every material comfort one could ever want at his fingertips, he lacks all the qualities that make life worth living – love, safety, community, joy.
The only people he has ever loved in his life is mother, who he pines for until the day of his death, and Leticia, a novice nun who he kidnaps and has shipped to himself. Over time she purports to love him, but does she really? He kidnapped and raped her, pushing her life into a direction that wasn’t of her own making. To possibly cope with the despair, she becomes an all-consuming devourer of things – fabric, food, clothing – until she and her son are literally devoured themselves by trained dogs.
The accounts of his life wander the page, rattling around just like the despot alone in his palace. Is this kind of power worth it? Is this kind of life worth living? Is the memory that he will leave behind, of his brutality and inhumanity, a legacy he knows he’s creating? The reader can’t help but be repulsed by this man, by this life and that, perhaps, is Marquez’s entire point.
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