Volume 23, Number 20 · December 9, 1976
Unhappy Dictators
By Michael Wood
The Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Harper & Row, 269 pp., $10.00
Reasons of State
by Alejo Carpentier, translated by Frances Partridge
Knopf, 311 pp., $10.00
Latin America has long worn two conflicting masks. One expresses charm, gaiety, sentiment, a mood of comic opera and a long-running belle époque. The other suggests torture, massacres, tyrants, and endlessly trampled constitutions. Are the masks connected? Is the first a consolation for the second? Does the second rely on the frivolous complicity of the first? Different countries require different answers, perhaps, and there is a more immediate difficulty, formulated with cold and humorous clarity in Conrad's Nostromo: how to get both masks in focus at once, how to treat many Latin American governments with the seriousness their atrocities deserve?
Review, 2941 words
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