Rising up from where they had always dozed on the cornices of the charity hospital they came, they came from farther inland, they came in successive waves, out of the horizon of the sea of dust where the sea had been, for a whole day they flew in slow circles over the house of power until a king with bridal-fan feathers and a crimson ruff gave a silent order and that breaking of glass began, that breeze of a great man dead, that in and out of vultures through the windows imaginable only in a house which lacked authority, so we dared go in too and in the deserted sanctuary we found the rubble of grandeur, the body that had been pecked at, the smooth maiden hands with the ring of power on the bone of the third finger, and his whole body was sprouting tiny lichens and parasitic animals from the depths of the sea, especially in the armpits and the groin, and he had the canvas truss on his herniated testicle, which was the only thing that had escaped the vultures in spite of its being the size of an ox kidney, but even then we did not dare believe in his death, because it was the second time he had been found in that office, alone and dressed and dead seemingly of natural causes during his sleep, as had been announced a lung time ago in the prophetic waters of soothsayers’ basins.The first time they found him had been at the beginning of his autumn, the nation was still lively enough for him to feel menaced by death even in the solitude of his bedroom, and still he governed as if he knew he was predestined never to die, for at that time it did not look like a presidential palace but, rather, like a marketplace where a person had to make his way through barefoot orderlies unloading vegetables and chicken cages from donkeys in the corridors, stepping over beggar women with his famished godchildren who were sleeping in a huddle on the stairs awaiting the miracle of official charity, it was necessary to elude the flow of dirty water from the foulmouthed concubines who were putting fresh flowers in the vases in place of nocturnal flowers and swabbing the floor and singing songs of impossible love to the rhythm of the dry branches that beat rugs on the balconies, and all of it in the midst of the uproar of tenured civil servants who found hens laying eggs in desk drawers, and the traffic of whores and soldiers in the toilets, and a tumult of birds, and the fighting of street dogs in the midst of audiences, because no one knew who was who, or by whom, in that palace with open doors in the grand disorder of which it was impossible to locate the government. The clergy and the church are brought back, but Leticia becomes more and more greedy, plus she brings her greedy family to the country.
Gabriel García Márquez, the …

Print Quarterly Journal + a limited-edition tote + all the perks of the digital membership. Excess typifies García Márquez’s style (remember the José Arcadio Buendía in [W]ith his ancient certainty that […] the very men he was arming and raising up so that they would support his regime will end up sooner or later spitting in the hand that feeds them, he wiped them out with one stroke, he took others out of nowhere, raised them to the highest ranks pointing at them according to the impulse of his inspiration, you to captain, you to colonel, you to general, and all the rest to lieutenant, what the hell, he watched them grow in their uniforms until they burst the seams, he lost sight of them …“The impulse of his inspiration” — in my Borgesian rereading, influenced as I am by our current administration, this scenario now seems altogether plausible.Beyond the roasted general and other horrors, the novel’s hallucinatory atmosphere rises from sentences that continue for pages with little or no punctuation (the opposite of Twitter, I suppose, but to similar effect), added to which there are various narrators from the oppressed community who enter and exit without introduction, a kind of Greek chorus in local garb. During a long series of wars, known as the Federalist wars, the General becomes the Head of State of the nation.

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