Chávez the Unfriendly Ghost
What will happen to Venezuela now that the caudillo is dead?
As Hugo Chávez’s illness entered its final stage, I began pondering his afterlife. He seemed destined for immediate sanctification, the sort of quasi-religious elevation that greeted Evita Perón. Hugo Chávez will continue to linger for years, I suspect, given the Venezuelan veneration of the military strong man, the caudillo. READ MORE >>
Undefeated
THE GREAT THEORIST Leszek Kolakowski once told the following parable: Two girls are racing in a park. The one behind cries at the top of her lungs, “I’m winning! I’m winning!” Suddenly, the girl in the lead quits the race and sobs into her mother’s arms: “There’s no way to beat her. She always wins.” READ MORE >>
In the Shadow of the Patriarch
All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims. --Gabriel García Márquez I. Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied. READ MORE >>
The Shah of Venezuela
I. READ MORE >>
Exorcisms
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa translated by Edith Grossman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 404 pp., $25) READ MORE >>
