Gabriel García Márquez repeatedly stated that The Autumn of the Patriarch is the novel in which he invested the most work and effort.
In The Autumn of the Patriarch , García Márquez built a perfect narrative machine that unravels a universal story - the agony and death of a dictator - in a cyclical, experimental and real way at the same time, in six narrative blocks without dialogue, without full stops, repeating an anecdote that is always the same and always different, accumulating dazzling facts and descriptions.
A novel written in Barcelona between 1968 and 1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch reveals in its background the most important event in Spanish history of those years, the death of General Franco, although its context and style are, as always with García Márquez, that of the astonishing Latin American reality, which the author has once again elevated to the dignity of myth.
«Over the weekend, vultures flew in through the balconies of the presidential house, pecked at the wire mesh of the windows and stirred up the stagnant time inside with their wings, and in the early hours of Monday the city awoke from its centuries-long lethargy with a warm and tender breeze of great death and rotten grandeur.»
