LITERATURE same lines. Not only One Hundred Years of Solitude but all my earlier writings were a prelude to Autumn of the Patriarch. The critics noted that the earlier writings were a prelude to One Hundred Years of Solitude but t^t Autumn of the Patriarch was something different. Whereas I feel it is just the opposite. My main interest has always been the problem of power. I feel that if Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost the war but won it he would have become a patriarch. His comrade, whom he is about to shoot, tells him: "If you win the war you will become the most bloody dictator the like of which the country has never seen." There is a moment when Buendia could have won the war, taken over power and become the bloodiest dictator. But then the bookwould have turned out to be something quite different. And that is why I left this twist for later on, for another book, for a book about a dictator. I left it for a book which I was preparing myself and which I had been wanting to write since long. It is in this sense, I think, that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a prelude to Autumn of the Patriarch but in that sense all else is also a prelude to it. In other words, the book that I was all along in search of and wanted to write was not One Hundred Years of Solitude but Autumn of the Patriarch. So, that's how it is. I began by saying what I have against the critics and end up agreeing with what they say. And so, if Colonel Aureliano Buendia had won the war and become a dictator, every thing would have been different. And then a book on a dictator requires a totally different approach. I'm afraid that One1. Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps liked by many because it is too light a book. And I'm also afraid that in most cases it is liked not because of what I find good in it but for those elements which I feel to be weak in the book. I feel that it somewhat resembles a novel that has been serialized for T.V. But Autumn of the Patriarch on the other hand demands a certain literary grounding. It is for this very reason that I like if. I like it a lot because I worked on it at leisure and when I could not write, I stopped writing. And when I did not know what should follow I let it lie. For instance, I suddenly felt that I can't remember the smell of guavas. And if I could not recall the^ smell of guavas, I understood that I had lost touch with my past, with my roots, because I was writing the book in Barcelona. I, a Latin American, found myself in a totally unique situation. I had no occasion to live through a dictatorship. In those days there was no suitable dictatorship for me to study in Latin America, to under- Journal of Arts and Ideas 33