The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published by Harper & Row, New York in 1975. Second printing. The book is hardcover with dust jacket. From a non-smoking home. Never in storage. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. 269 pages. The book is in fine condition. The dust jacket has some tears at the top front edge. See picture.
From the jacket:
"A dictator's body is discovered in his enormous, crumbling palace. Revolutionaries burst in and find his rotting corpse in an anarchic tangle of past and present-- a present already lost and decayed, a past of almost unimaginable richness in which the palace was crowded with the dictator's ministers, bodyguards and servants, who kept him precariously balanced in power and also with a tribe of women and children. The atmosphere is dreamlike--even nighmarish--real, vibrant and sensually exact, and at the same time vague and almost unbelievable."
The novel moves back and forth, round and round. The country is not specified nor is the relatively recent time. As the dictator disintegrates his double replaces him at public functions and is eventually assinated.
