I got through this novel the same way it was written; fitfully. García Márquez spent the best part of seven years (1968-1975) refining it before finally submitting it for publication in Madrid and it has taken me almost twice as long to cross the finishing line.
Borges famously observed of Gabo's One Hundred Years of Solitude that "The first 50 years aren't bad at all". Here it's not so much that you feel that you are progressively moving from the depths to the shallows, but that you are getting less and less out of this imaginative swirl of hyper-history.
'Patriarch' has an Amazon sales rank today of 53, 486, the lowest of the Colombian writer's three acknowledged masterpieces. (One Hundred Years of Solitude is at number 513, whilst Love in the Time of Cholera is a respectable 2,759th.) There's no doubt that it's a much more challenging read than the others. It sports an experimental style Gabo is said to have borrowed from Faulkner, but reminds me of nothing less than the sparsely-punctuated emails I get from friends and family in Guatemala, with their never-ending sentences often bearing sudden, disconcerting shifts of perspective.
It belongs to an illustrious quartet of novels that represent the worst excesses of Latin American despotism in the twentieth century. The others are Yo, el Supremo (1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos (not one I've read), Miguel Angel Asturias' El Señor Presidente (1946) and Mario Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo (2000).
Gabo deliberately made his patriarch a composite, containing elements of all the solitary, paranoid tyrants he had ever read about, and while this makes for an elaborate and powerful portrait, at times it lacks the red passion of real history in its veins - a quality the others have in abundance. This tendency towards the generic is further exacerbated by Gabo's intention to use this exploration of the "solitary vice of power" to throw further light on the character-type, abundant in all his novels, that is congenitally incapable of the emotion (and virtue) of love. The resulting re-imagined archetype is eerily reminiscent of not only of the twentieth century's most notorious dictators, but also of some of its Popes and celebrities, most obviously Michael Jackson.
Just outside the big trio of the Gabo canon lies Chronicle of a Death Foretold, possibly my favourite of his works. It too is stylistically complex, beginning with its own conclusion and then spiralling around the preceeding events before returning on the last page. It's also a lot more like a real story, with the necessary elements of dramatic tension so clearly missing in 'Patriarch'.
Still, there's no question that this novel deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. Every ten pages or so Gabo distills a landmark hyper-truth from another striking image that emerges triumphantly from the metaphorical glut. This literary sorcery is just enough to keep you turning the pages.
Gabo's anciano crepuscular has the walls of his palace toilet whitewashed each day so that he can keep up to date with the latest malicious graffiti-gossip, yet by the end of his unfathomably long reign it is he alone who is scratching "Que viva el General!" onto these same walls, while in the afternoons he watches ersatz episodes of telenovelas on CCTV, created specially for him.
In this autumn of his rule, after his nation's gringo creditors have carried off the Caribbean sea in numbered pieces, the General discovers that it is "impossible for him to give an order that had not been carried out long before", that his officers and ministers are keeping him in "the senile backwater of the hammock", yet don't dare kill him because they know that afterwards they would have to kill each other.
"We ended up not understanding what would become of us without him" admits one of the many voices making up what one critic has called the "stream of national consciousness".
Gabo is said to have recommended Gregory Rabassa's English translation as an improvement on his original! This may have further embittered Guatemala's Nobel Laureate Asturias whose own masterworks fared less well in translation. In spite of the faults of the English-language version, El Señor Presidente ('Mr President'!) is still my strongest recommendation to anyone that only has the time (or stomach) for one Latin American literary tyrant.
(PS: It was Edith Grossman not Gregory Rabassa who rendered Love in the Time of Cholera in English and bizarrely skipped a whole page in the process. The mistake is hard to detect because fortuitously some continuous sense has been preserved, but it does significantly change the meaning of the scene that has been thus accidentally abridged.)
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