The Autumn of the Patriarch translates into words an image that haunted Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was the image of an old man wandering aimlessly through the wasting rooms of a palace. It was an image of death and decay. The Patriarch is an ancient dictator whose exact title is General Of The Universe even though his domain is a poor Caribbean country, dependent upon the charity of world powers. His Autumn is the personal decay that preceeds his death. And his death is the focal point with which the novel begins, returns and ends. Each chapter begins with a different stage of discovering the general's corpse and backtracks to a different stage of the moral/physical decay that leads to such an end….

The Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel of style. And it is a style that I generally dislike. A style in which sentences...