The Autumn of the Patriarch (36 page)

‘The vigour and coherence of Márquez’s vision, the brilliance and beauty of his imagery, the narrative tension … coursing through his pages … makes it difficult to put down’
Daily Telegraph

At the age of forty-six General Simón Bolívar,
who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolívar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all
his life …

www.penguin.com

‘A gripping tale of survival’
The Times

‘On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Colombia …’

In 1955, eight crew members of
Caldas
, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on
a raft for ten days without food or water. Márquez retells the survivor’s amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
was Márquez’s first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, 
El Espectador
, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

‘The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks
over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic’
Independent

www.penguin.com

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin
Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block
D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

www.penguin.com

First published in Spanish as
El Otoño del Patriarca
1975
This English translation first published in the United States of America by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1976
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan
Cape 1977
Published in Penguin Books 1996
This edition published 2014

Copyright © Gabriel García Márquez, 1975
English translation copyright © Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1976

Cover © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

All rights reserved

Portions of this work originally appeared in the
New Yorker

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-91725-2