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Cover of The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez

The Autumn of the Patriarch

Gabriel García Márquez

  • 271 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 1975
  • 78 editions
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1 About this book

The Autumn of the Patriarch (original Spanish title: El otoño del patriarca) is a 1975 political novel by Gabriel García Márquez.

A "poem on the solitude of power" according to the author, the novel is a flowing tract on the life of an eternal dictator. The book is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypal Caribbean tyrant.

García Márquez based his fictional dictator on a variety of real-life leaders, including Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of his Colombian homeland, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain (the novel was written in Barcelona), François Duvalier of Haiti, and Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gómez. The product is a universal story of the disastrous effects created by the concentration of power into a single man.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • Romance literature
  • Corruption
  • Dictators
  • Colombian fiction
  • Loneliness
  • World literature
  • Fiction subjects
  • Social conditions

2 About Gabriel García Márquez

1927–2014

Gabriel José García Márquez (Latin American Spanish: ; 6 March 1928 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian writer and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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