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Books Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch is a completely historical book. To find probabilities out of real facts is the work of the journalist and the novelist, and it is also the work of the prophet.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review Gabriel García Márquez The Paris Review 1981
What García Márquez is after is a language that can contain individual consciousnesses but is not confined by any one, a language that can encompass a whole human condition, that can accommodate the contradictory illusions of which it is made up.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New Yorker Alastair Reid New Yorker 1976
But García Márquez is as exorbitant as Melville and Dostoyevsky. He believes not only that excess is good for you, but that it is essential, that a book must have an immensity about it in the same way life is enormous—and dense and mysterious and as repetitiously predictable as the General’s vengeance for an affront. How else, his novel implicitly asks, could the story of interminable dictatorship be told?

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times William Kennedy New York Times 1976

There were technical maneuvers in Autumn of the Patriarch—the business of the point of view changing within a given sentence, for instance—that I thought very effective, almost one hundred percent effective. It was his genius to stress the sorrows of the dictator, the angst of the monster.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review Donald Barthelme The Paris Review 1981
There is a wavering of style running through the book […]: a note of what ought to be parody but actually reads like fine writing smuggled in behind the shifts of narrative point of view.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Wood New York Review of Books 1976