What is supremely interesting [in The Autumn of the Patriarch], and more so than anything in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is García Márquez's modus operandi, which a merely cursory description would have to call a voluptuous, thick, garish, centripetal weaving and re-weaving of quasi-narrative motifs that figure now as emblems, now as salient samples of all the stuff from which the world is made (at least the Caribbean one), now as earnests of a dominant presence who might be the dictator's wife Leticia, the dictator aping his double, the double aping the dictator's aping the double or the dead head of either or schoolgirls, or even an indeterminate chorus of voices all of whom have something to contribute to the burgeoning mythos of one distended career…. (pp. 76-7)

Hyperbole is the keynote, of course; even when it isn't on stage it is hovering, off, ready...