The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa
New York: Harper & Row 269 pp., $10.00

So many complimentary statements have been made over the past few years about the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez and his most renowned achievement, One Hundred Years of Solitude, that it might be useful at this juncture to pause and cast a gimlet eye over this selfsame critical commentary. It might be useful to find out whether we now “see” the book in the same way that most critics did when it was first published in English in 1970. And of course, there is the matter of García Márquez’ new novel—The Autumn of the Patriarch. It remains to be seen whether this novel bears any relation to the much vaunted One Hundred Years of Solitude, whether there are such things as “second acts” in Spanish American contemporary literature, when Scott Fitzgerald long ago told us North American “Second acts” were few and far between, if they existed at all. Let it be said at the outset that The Autumn of the Patriarch will ultimately affect the way we read all of the author’s previous novels, novellas, and short stories. I say further that The Autumn of the Patriarch is better than One Hundred Years of Solitude. By far.

A good place to start when talking about One Hundred Years might be the book review that turned out to be García Márquez’ North American launching pad and orbital entry combined. I refer to the New York Times review (March 3. 1970) by the then daily reviewer and later editor of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, John Leonard. This piece faithfully registers the brand of critical ecstasy and socko resume that is not at all Untypical of the general critical reception in this country:

You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendia family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendias inventors, artisans, soldiers, lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride a biological tragicycle in circles from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.

That is just for starters, you understand. Paul West in Book World found a “technicolor tableau of fools which, got up as a family saga, stretches the mind by cramming it and reenacts paradise found and lost as a version of Latin America’s own history” (February 22, 1970). The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes saw that the mythical locale of the novel, Macondo, was “the seat of time, consecration of time, meeting place of memory and desire, present where everything can re-commence: a book, a temple” (Siempre, June 29, 1966). These are not at all untypical samples. The general feeling was, and most certainly still is, that this: novel, along with other works of such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Carlos Fuentes, finally brought Spanish American literature into the full mainstream of international reputation and accomplishment, with no apologies or excuses. And too, it can be said that an extraordinarily consistent critical canon has evolved around One Hundred Years of Solitude. a canon which is lately beginning to seem a bit too adulatory. The most obvious recent example is Mario Vargas Llosa’s Historia de un deicidio, a full-length literary history of all of García Márquez’ work; it borders on being a literary hagiography. None of this would be of any importance were it not for the fact that it is preventing us from rereading many of García Márquez’ texts critically, really critically. Since rereading is such a pleasurable occasion, is this not the moment for a leisurely reconsideration?

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