The Autumn of the Patriarch - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Everything I've read by Marquez has been enjoyable at the least, fantastic at the best. This is apparently the exception. 

It's about the death of some incredibly old general that ruled over a Latin American nation for decades after being installed by either the British or the Americans. He seems to have been controlled by his fear for at least part of the time. Fear of being assassinated, which is an understandable fear when you are the sort of person who secretly observes the funeral of your double so you can see who celebrates or speaks ill and then have them killed or imprisoned.

I can't say much more about the story itself because I only got 45 pages in before tapping out. The stylistic approach Marquez takes is horrendous. Every chapter (and the first 45 pages are the first chapter) is just one long paragraph, which is made of ridiculously long sentences. I tried reading one to Alex as an example (the quote below a small part of it) and stopped after a page, because the sentence continues for another 2.5 pages beyond that.

It's not quite a stream-of-consciousness, ala Tristram Shandy or Michael Pera's character in Ant-Man. It isn't a thread being constantly derailed by irrelevant details. There is a method to how the information is related. As though the narrator is trying to tell it in a rush before they are executed. Which they may be, the narrator is another general who was a trusted friend to the deceased, but it's exhausting to read. There's no point that lends itself to taking a break to process any of what we've been told because they just keep talking. Even when there's a conversation going on, it's not really a conversation. It's someone relating what the two characters said to the reader in the worst way possible.

'. . .that I can tell you now that I never loved you as you think but that ever since the day of the filibusters when I had the evil misfortune to chance into your domains I've been praying that you would be killed, in a good way even, so that you would pay me back for this life of an orphan you gave me, first by flattening my feet with tamping hands so they would be those of a sleepwalker like yours, then by piercing my nuts with a shoemaker's awl so I would develop a rupture, then by making me drink turpentine so I would forget how to read and write after all the work it took my mother to teach me. . .'