An experience called "Autumn of the Patriarch"

I was planning to write about “Brave new world” first, but since I thought I needed to compose my thoughts more, I would be commenting on “The Autumn of the patriarch” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Reading this novel was a whole new experience. Some books like “Brave new world” have made me think, but this is the one which has made to feel strongly. Not that there wasn’t anything to think about it, but that happens much later. The novel is about the life of a tyrant of an imaginary Caribbean country. Marquez’s imagery and narrative is so stunningly beautiful that we become a part of this novel, sympathizing with the people of the country ruled by the tyrant and also sympathizing with how a normal person with normal fallacies becomes a tyrant.

Marquez follows a ‘stream of consciousness’ style here – which means that the flow is as chaotic as our everyday thinking. It starts somewhere and in between branches of to something related, backwards or forwards in time and often Marquez doesn’t come back to where he started. The whole novel is organized as six independent sections (or chapters) – independent because they don’t exactly build upon events in earlier chapters. Each one starts just after the death of the dictator, and crisscrosses time and space. To heighten the effect, Marquez uses long (really long) sentences running to 3-4 pages usually and last one (which is the last chapter) running to some 50 pages. Of course these are not grammatical, as everything like person, tense and time change during a sentence and to add to all this the author doesn’t put dialogs in quotes. What results is a novel which is quite difficult to get into. But I think it is these same things which add to the magical appeal of the novel – the ‘stream of consciousness’ with long sentences really make the happenings a little bit confusing and hence add a magical, illusionary appeal – it hints on the theme of the novel – deception and self-deception. It is as if, the state machinery deceives the people about the dictator and dictator about the people so from either side we don’t get the true picture and hence traces of that deception remain in the reader’s mind too. Apart from the style, Marquez doesn’t use much of magical realism here, but where he uses, it intensifies the imagery superbly.

I also felt like regretting the choice of the novel for the first 15-20 pages, but once I really got in, nothing, not even the effort of reading each part at least twice to understand it, could stop me. The imagery and narrative was breathtaking and it was really an experience to read this. For instance, in one of the sequence where the dictator’s wife is assassinated, the description wasn’t exactly so gory, but the imagery was so disturbing that I had to take my eyes off and relax for a minute or so. The final page really drives home the theme of self-deception. Reflecting on this, I realized how dangerous self-deception was and even recognized some instances from my life where I have willingly deceived myself. This can also be read as a tragic tale of how a simple person is pushed in to becoming a dictator for his life. But most of all, this can be simply read for its literary splendor; it’s breathtaking and awe-inspiring imagery.
Below is my favorite quote from this novel, plucked out from near the end of last sentence and another quote to go with it.

"...but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he
discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable
than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived
without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of
being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority..."
Gabriel
Garcia Marquez,"The Autumn of the Patriarch".

"Nothing is so easy
as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe." Demosthenes, Greek
Orator.

A desperate move?

I have a lot of things in my mind and since I wasn’t finding enough time to put them down, I thought I can take a look at a current issue. As some would have guessed from the title, it is nothing but the “ban” on release of non-Kannada films for 7 weeks after their release elsewhere. Surprisingly, this ‘ban’ is not from the government but from the film producers association (or whatever it’s called), but seemingly has the tacit support of the government. While the ban, which is from somebody outside the government being implemented, is itself a cause for deep concern, the reasons given for the ban are only more so. This move is supposed to protect the Kannada film industry and give more (captive) market for the Kannada films. I don’t know how they expected everyone to start viewing Kannada films just because other films are not available, rather than do the obvious, view the same other language films through pirated VCDs. The first obvious reaction of this ban has already come with the closure of many theatres in Bangalore. If, god forbid, should the ban become permanent, the net effect would be that most of the theatres which showed non-Kannada films would close down and there would be an increase of piracy for all these films and as a side-effect for the Kannada films too. Thus the producers association seems to have come up with a magical solution which harms both parties. The only reason for such a move could be, I think, desperation. After this ban, I came to know from various press reports that the Kannada film industry is in quite a bad shape. But the solution is to introspect and improve the quality of Kannada films, not these kind of moves which seem to be an acceptance of the poor quality of Kannada films. Of course during the rebuilding period some kind of protection may be required for Kannada films, which can be enforced in a much gentler manner like requiring all theatres to screen a fixed number (which should be judiciously decided) of Kannada films in a year. These kind of moves only end up in making people seeing other language films feeling discriminated against. As an aside, moves like these and some simple things like bus route labels still being in Kannada only, makes me feel that Bangalore is still unable to reconcile itself being a cosmopolitan city. Click here to see how a Kannada filmmaker also feels in the same way (read under sub-heading 'appalled').