The general is dead. The Patriarch is gone--succumbing finally to an immense old age (some say he was 107 when he died; others claim he was 232). Once he was a popular figure, a man who loved the poor of his sun-drenched Caribbean land. But that was long ago. Before he locked himself in the palace with his guards and his concubines. Before he sold his coastal waters to the United States ("they took away the Caribbean in April. . . carried it off in numbered pieces"). Before his mother was canonized by presidential decree. Before his defense minister was served up on a silver platter (as the piece de resistance of a banquet for the palace's plotting junior officers). Before the Pope began to inquire about the 2000 missing children. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has created a surrealistic world filled with Rabelaisian characters caught up, as The New York Times put it, in "a boiling cauldron of rage, lament, sarcasm, despair, affection, hope and exasperation."