Times Online

The myths of Gabriel García Márquez

Feb 11 -- An authoritative life of Latin America's only truly global writer.

Philip Swanson
11 de febrero de 2009

Near the beginning of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), the founding father of Macondo, the fictional dusty town that is the epicentre of the Colombian’s literary universe, teaches his children to read and write by expounding to them the “magical wonders of the world, in a way that not only touched the limits of his and their knowledge, but that forced to incredible extremes the limits of his and their imagination”.
 
This can be taken as a kind of model of how to write, but also how to read the magical realist text that the reader is about to begin. Herein lie the energy and ambiguity that make García Márquez’s writing so compelling. In one of the earliest great novels to derive from the Third World and find an international audience, the reader is being exhorted to an act of political imagination, to abandon passivity and dare to invent a new kind of reality.
 
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