The Autumn of the Patriarch

IN THE AUTUMN of the Patriarch, the theme is once again solitude, this time that of the dictator of a mythical Latin American nation, who simply will not die: he measures his age by the appearances of Haley's Comet. In fact, he is so reclusive, old and omnipotent that the stages of his decline loom like the death of God.

Garcia Marquez may disappoint those who are looking for The Return of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Instead of creating a swarm of characters, he has really animated only the Patriarch, whose monologue distills all other voices. And rather than using his blunt, ironic prose, he has fashioned an elaborate rhetoric that washes everything into a flow of phrases and thoughts.

Still, fans of Macondo will recognize the magic and hyperbole. For example, as the ultimate outrage the Americans confiscate the sea in partial payment of the national debt: they survey it, roll it up and ship it home to water the Arizona desert, leaving an endless lunar plain.

As in One Hundred Years, a kernel of reality lies in the Patriarch's story. Garcia Marquez says that he learned everything he could about actual dictators, then forgot it all in order to write the novel. The Patriarch ages, contemptibly deaf and senile, gradually cut off from authority by bureaucrats who preserve him as a useful relic. He caricatures Franco propped up by his bodyguards in motorcades and at podiums, or the pathetic fake photograph of Mao swimming in the Yangtze River. His solitariness is the loneliness of power taken to its extreme and most human degree.

Linked to the Patriarch's slipping are the tropics continually decaying: dusty palms, the band playing on Sundays in the park, the abandoned American cruiser rusting at its dock. The brilliant fantasy of Garcia Marquez's details exorcizes tropical nostalgia, and makes The Autumn of the Patriarch the rarest novel to appear this year.