This entry will be quick. I am writing it despite questioning the reason why I would want to spend any time analysing the parallels between a book, The Autumn of the Patriarch, which I simply endured, with a President that I have barely endured.
In sentences that seem to last for pages, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces us to a monster of a dictator who terrorizes his people while unnaturally living somewhere between 107 and 232 years. The dictator repeatedly roams through his palace assaulting concubines, milking cows that share his quarters, and kicking lepers in the rose bushes. He selfishly employs his power for inane projects like ordering the time of day changed by five hours so that his roses open earlier, rigging the weekly lottery to his advantage, or campaigning to have his dead mother canonized (building a wasteful wall at extraordinary cost? holding rallies inside without masks in a pandemic? campaigning for “patriotic” lessons in schools?).
Okay, there are some differences in extremes. Unlike our President who claims not to know dishonest panderers or fires his enemies through tweets, this dictator literally serves his enemies to his generals on a platter. But the passages where the dictator made 2000 kidnapped children disappear rather than face questions by the League of Nations reminded me of the heartlessness of this administration’s “children in cages”.
Could I be the only one making the leap from this tyrant to Trump? No. A quick Google search brought up NPR’s This Week Must Read article in August 2019 that compared Autumn of the Patriarch’s fictional dictator’s purchase of the Carribean Sea, so that it could be shipped off to Arizona to settle a debt with an American ambassador, to Trump’s surreal declaration that he wanted to purchase Greenland.
Critics credit Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his mastery of magical realism. Magical realism is a form of literature when fantastical elements are normalized into real-life situations. I have no patience for how magical realism places a constant burden on the reader to unthread truth from fantasy. I couldn’t wait for the Autumn of the Patriarch to end so I could cross it off my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list.
This President lives in his own reality and weaves lies into every statement. I have no more patience for him. Please, please, please let this autumn bring the end to our “patriarch”, the male instigator of the worst instincts of the Trump base. Please, please, please. I want to cross him off my mind and move forward.
P.S. Hey, you say, that’s a fake book cover! I know, I say, I did it because I wanted to and I felt I could get away with it - just call it magical realism.