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What are readers saying about The Autumn of the Patriarch?
| Reviews of The Autumn of the Patriarch - Page 1 of 3 |
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-06-25 07:37:20.
(Language: English)
   
If you like sentences and paragraphs, don't read this book.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-08-17 02:34:08.
(Language: Spanish)
AMOR,ACEPTACION Y PERDON
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-12-20 10:00:14.
(Language: English)
I enjoy reading this bookand I will read it again.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-12-24 05:55:38.
(Language: English)
How is it that I can read thirteen pages with only one period. Cannot get past the run-on sentences. Stark and tangly.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-08 06:05:55.
(Language: English)
Recently finished it, WHEW! This book is not for the light of heart and I imagine only hardcore readers, scholars, and Marquez fanatics will ever get through it completely. Sentences go on for pages at a time without a period and it's hard to put it down...not because it's captivating but because it's hard to stop reading a book in mid-sentence. At first I found it to be quite a challenge to read, but after the first 100 pages I started getting into the groove of Marquez's particular writing style for this one. This is also one where I needed a dictionary by my side throughout the whole thing; not because of unfamiliar words, but having a word's definition in front of you helps you better understand why Marquez used a particular word instead of another. It's about a nation and its oppressive, tyranical dictator with elements of magic and pretty unbelievable stuff thrown in. It's tragic, humorous, and a total mind-fuck at certain times and sometimes all three simultaneously. All of this is to be expected in most of Marquez's works. If you read Marquez's masterpiece--One Hundred Years of Solitude--and picked this up because you were expecting something similar, then you may want to read something else. No doubt that Marquez's brilliance is prevalent all throughout Autumn of the Patriarch, but if you're a casual reader then chances are you'll be scratching your head through the entire novel.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-06-02 05:09:47.
(Language: English)
It is amazing. I've read Garcia Marquez before, but maybe I was too young, or maybe I started off withe the wrong book, because his force never struck me. If you ever lived, experienced or know a thing or two about dictatorship than all you knew will be confirmed. If you never came in contact with the phenomenon, than you will definitively be shocked. The writing is amazing and it did not cease to drag me in, to hypnotize me in a maze of words, in phrases that are even 20 pages long without becoming unintelligible...
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-04-25 10:29:08.
(Language: English)
Inspirado en las dictaduras militares latinoamericanas del siglo XX, García Márquez relata, con más realismo que magia, la historia de un general solitario que gobierna sin contrapeso en un país ficticio que podría ser cualquiera entre Cabo de Hornos y el Río Grande. Desde Videla a Fidel Castro, de Vicente Gómez a Pinochet, de Rafael Trujillo y a Stroessner. Cualquiera podría verse encarnado en la figura del protagonista. Escrita en un particular estilo con sólo 6 puntos apartes en todo el libro, donde los respiros los dan sólo unos pocos puntos seguidos y donde una pluralidad de voces se apodera de la primera persona sin previo aviso y con constantes saltos temporales, El Otoño del Patriarca no es una novela fácil de leer, pero vale la pena el esfuerzo. Es la más acabada de todas las obras del Nóbel de Literatura de 1982.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-02-29 02:18:39.
(Language: English)
un récit du règne d'un dictateur sud-américain comme il en a existé beaucoup, au travers de mille anecdotes et aventures extraordinaires. Le fil est d'autant plus difficile à reconstituer que le patriarche en question aurait "entre 107 et 232 ans", qu'une rumeur court sur son remplacement par un sosie à une époque lointaine (il y a la même théorie à propos du président finlandais Kekkonen dans un bouquin d'Arto Paasilinna).Là où ça se complique, c'est quand on essaye de lire par petits morceaux (dans les transports par exemple). Dense est un mot bien faible pour expliquer le style. Le livre est découpé en six chapitres, et en pas beaucoup plus de phrases. Les premières phrases du livre font quelques pages, la dernière, qui constitue le chapitre 6, plus de cinquante. Proust peut retourner manger des madeleines. Si on y ajoute l'emploi abondant du style indirect libre, le passage fréquent de la troisième à la première personne et les constructions de phrases tordues, cela donne un bouquin pas forcément très digeste. On s'interrompt au milieu d'une phrase pour reprendre la lecture le lendemain, un peu déboussolé. Reste l'univers de GarcÃa Márquez, riche de ces petites trouvailles qui arrachent un sourire au lecteur au détour d'une péripétie d'un des personnages.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-12-14 08:55:58.
(Language: English)
Un étudiant irlandais parcourt le monde à la recherche de la fille de ses rêves, et il retrouve partout une vingtaine de personnages qui écument les congrès et n'en finissent pas de se croiser. C'est un peu moins drôle que Changement de décor, dont on retrouve plusieurs personnages dix ans après. L'intrigue est à peu près celle des Feux de l'amour, assaisonnée de quelques dissertations sur le structuralisme. Rien que la description en "temps réel" d'une journée de la vie des quelque quinze personnages dispersés aux quatre coins du globe vaut largement le coup.
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Andre posted a review at 2011-07-09 02:36:22.
(Language: English)
um... wow... yeah... damn that was a really long sentence.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-12-14 09:48:13.
(Language: English)
When you start this book you will be taken aback by the intensely strong language (both difficult AND vulgar) and the very very very long sentences which sometimes are as long as the whole chapter. But at the first page you are sure to be mesmerized by the beautiful prose and intense imagery, and the small details that just keep u pinned to your chair tasting fully every word. The story of your typical Latin tyrant, but with a little twist in detail which makes him more of a criminal, pervert, lover, legend, and well, human being. The general in Gabo's story rules for over 100 years during which he bombed children in the sea, received a daily sack of heads of his opponents, played dominoes with foreign dignitaries, faked his death, exiled the Church, molested school girls, lost his mother, his only wife, and his only son, and lost the sea. Gabo certainly knows how to make you hate someone in one second and feel sorry for him the very next. The general had weird quirks like hiding honey in special places, looking at the sea a specific number of times a day, locking and bolting his bedroom door three times, writing small notes to remind himself of things and plugging them into the cracks in the wall, counting the cows and chickens, healing the lepers and invalid who live in his rosebushes, and well, of course sleeping around with any woman available regardless of his herniated testicle. His long reign brought him from his utmost strength and cruelty to the humiliation of age and forgetfulness, a somewhat karma-driven chain of events since the deal of his mother with mites coming out of her back, his only wife and son eaten by trained dogs, and the Caribbean being taken by the "gringos" right under his nose. Favorite Quotes: "..he had them take the children out of their hiding place in the jungle and carry them off in the opposite direction to the provinces of perpetual rain where there were no treasonous winds to spread their voices, where the animals of the earth rotted away as they walked and lilies grew on words and octopuses swam among the trees" "So they took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing's nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside, general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons"
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-12-01 12:11:55.
(Language: English)
Story of a fictional Latin America's dictator, but based on real life autocrats. A journey through the solitude of an omnipotent person. Sophisticated language and metaphores. A pleasure to read, reminded me a bit of Schultzian's The Cinnamon Shops.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-03-28 03:03:48.
(Language: Spanish)
Extraordinario, como todo lo que escribe García Marquez.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-02-25 03:59:37.
(Language: English)
"Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking thru the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside and on monday morning the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries to the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur."
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Kip posted a review at 2008-10-22 08:01:46.
(Language: English)
I love Marquez's work, but this is more experiment than novel. I found it unfortunately unreadable.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-11-22 01:24:34.
(Language: English)
Una obra maestra de la narrativa, aunque de lectura compleja.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-06-25 09:29:02.
(Language: English)
APESAR DE LONGO, UMA EXPERIENCIA DE LEITURA E UMA ABORDAGEM POÉTICA
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-25 10:30:06.
(Language: English)
This is just about the only book of his that I would say stay away from. It is a truly tiresome and pointless read(and I love the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez!). At one point it goes 80 pages without a single piece of punctuation discussing everything from its belly button to the texture of chicken feet in one fever delerium induced runon sentence(like this but a million times worse).
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-12-08 09:00:31.
(Language: English)
I finally finished it! Wow. This book is complete madness. It starts off with 40-page chapters and zero paragraph breaks, except between chapters, and half-a-page sentences, and by the end, the chapters are longer and the sentences are even longer with many many commas, so that by the end when one gets close to the end there are just no periods anymore. Whew! And you thought the preceding sentence was long. Oh, and the narrator changes a bunch ... and it's cyclical, going back and forth between the present when the general's body is found, and some time in the past when the general is still in power. And many parts are outrageous. Like the part about the kidnapped children. Bottom line: Read this if you're ambitious and able to focus on the words despite the strange structure. I think it's worth it. I can't say it'll be easy though. The New York Times has a good review. Check it out..
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-01-25 04:54:09.
(Language: English)
Let us Rave. Totally original (as far as I know anyway). So many things about this book were so novel to me that I don't know where to start. The style.. oh the Style. Marquez does this thing where one part of the sentence is one person narrating and some other part is someone else's thoughts as though I'm an angel tuning in to everyone's thoughts in parallel but narrating in serial and you can see the lies in my narration even though they aren't lies to the thinkers but they were the lies they told us general sir, the lies that you wanted to believe because I know that if I wanted I could always tell what the truths were and what the lies were and in knowingly accepting their lies I lied to myself. So yeah... read the book and you get something like that, only not a cheap imitation, the real deal. He also does a little bit of mixing of fantasy and reality as in 100 years. This book has something that I find hard to describe.. it has character in the language. By that I mean that after you finish reading it, you are left feeling that what he was talking about was _real_, in the sense that the language has an identity of a language from some other place... certain phrases are repeated over and over.. and a certain pattern of thinking is consistently adhered to. GAH. That doesn't make any sense does it.. that's cool, I don't need to make sense.It is a pain to keep track of where you are though. The story jumps around so much that if you stop reading at some point, you have no idea where you left off when you come back.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-11-24 08:57:13.
(Language: English)
enticing.. scary at the same time attractive.. a wonderworld..
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-11-24 05:23:42.
(Language: English)
Che prosa complicata, è una fatica leggerlo prima di andare a dormire
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-01-17 05:50:00.
(Language: English)
Garcia Marquez's best novel. A poignant examination of the loneliness of power.
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Rasha posted a review at 2011-03-24 07:24:37.
(Language: English)
just buy it 2day
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| Reviews of The Autumn of the Patriarch - Page 1 of 3 |
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