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"He Gave Us Back Our History": Isabel Allende on Gabriel García Márquez in Exclusive Interview (1/2)

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Gabriel García Márquez was interviewed in his studio/office located just behind his house in San Angel Inn, an old and lovely section, full of the spectacularly colorful flowers of Mexico City. The studio is a short walk from the main house. A low elongated building, it appears to have been originally designed as a guest house. Within, at one end, are a couch, two easy chairs, and a makeshift bar-a small white refrigerator with a supply of acqua minerale on top.

The most striking feature of the room is a large blown-up photograph above the sofa of García Márquez alone, wearing a stylish cape and standing on some windswept vista looking somewhat like Anthony Quinn.

García Márquez was sitting at his desk at the far end of the studio. He came to greet me, walking briskly with a light step. He is a solidly built man, only about five feet eight or nine in height, who looks like a good middleweight fighter-broad-chested, but perhaps a bit thin in the legs. He was dressed casually in corduroy slacks with a light turtleneck sweater and black leather boots. His hair is dark and curly brown and he wears a full mustache.

The interview took place over the course of three late-afternoon meetings of roughly two hours each. Although his English is quite good, García Márquez spoke mostly in Spanish and his two sons shared the translating. When García Márquez speaks, his body often rocks back and forth. His hands too are often in motion making small but decisive gestures to emphasize a point, or to indicate a shift of direction in his thinking. He alternates between leaning forward towards his listener, and sitting far back with his legs crossed when speaking reflectively.

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about using the tape recorder?

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The problem is that the moment you know the interview is being taped, your attitude changes. In my case I immediately take a defensive attitude. As a journalist, I feel that we still haven't learned how to use a tape recorder to do an interview. The best way, I feel, is to have a long conversation without the journalist taking any notes. Then afterward he should reminisce about the conversation and write it down as an impression of what he felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. What ticks you off about the tape recording everything is that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed, because it even records and remembers when you make an ass of yourself. That's why when there is a tape recorder, I am conscious that I'm being interviewed; when there isn't a tape recorder, I talk in an unconscious and completely natural way.

INTERVIEWER

Well, you make me feel a little guilty using it, but I think for this kind of an interview we probably need it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Anyway, the whole purpose of what I just said was to put you on the defensive.

INTERVIEWER

So you have never used a tape recorder yourself for an interview?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

As a journalist, I never use it. I have a very good tape recorder, but I just use it to listen to music. But then as a journalist I've never done an interview. I've done reports, but never an interview with questions and answers.

INTERVIEWER

I heard about one famous interview with a sailor who had been shipwrecked.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

It wasn't questions and answers. The sailor would just tell me his adventures and I would rewrite them trying to use his own words and in the first person, as if he were the one who was writing. When the work was published as a serial in a newspaper, one part each day for two weeks, it was signed by the sailor, not by me. It wasn't until twenty years later that it was re-published and people found out I had written it. No editor realized that it was good until after I had written One Hundred Years of Solitude.

INTERVIEWER

Since we've started talking about journalism, how does it feel being a journalist again, after having written novels for so long? Do you do it with a different feel or a different eye?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I've always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I didn't like about journalism before were the working conditions. Besides, I had to condition my thoughts and ideas to the interests of the newspaper. Now, after having worked as a novelist, and having achieved financial independence as a novelist, I can really choose the themes that interest me and correspond to my ideas. In any case, I always very much enjoy the chance of doing a great piece of journalism.

INTERVIEWER

What is a great piece of journalism for you?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Hiroshima by John Hersey was an exceptional piece.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a story today that you would especially like to do?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

There are many, and several I have in fact written. I have written about Portugal, Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam. I would very much like to write on Poland. I think if I could describe exactly what is now going on, it would be a very important story. But it's too cold now in Poland; I'm a journalist who likes his comforts.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the novel can do certain things that journalism can't?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Nothing. I don't think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.

INTERVIEWER

Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

INTERVIEWER

In interviews a few years ago, you seemed to look back on being a journalist with awe at how much faster you were then.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I do find it harder to write now than before, both novels and journalism. When I worked for newspapers, I wasn't very conscious of every word I wrote, whereas now I am. When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn't be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small. On a good working day, working from nine o'clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.

INTERVIEWER

Does this change come from your works being so highly praised or from some kind of political commitment?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

It's from both. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

INTERVIEWER

How did you start writing?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

By drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer. When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . ." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. They are totally intellectual short stories because I was writing them on the basis of my literary experience and had not yet found the link between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá and they did have a certain success at the time-probably because nobody in Colombia was writing intellectual short stories. What was being written then was mostly about life in the countryside and social life. When I wrote my first short stories I was told they had Joycean influences.

INTERVIEWER

Had you read Joyce at that time?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I had never read Joyce, so I started reading Ulysses. I read it in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing-the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes.

INTERVIEWER

Can you name some of your early influences?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The people who really helped me to get rid of my intellectual attitude towards the short story were the writers of the American Lost Generation. I realized that their literature had a relationship with life that my short stories didn't. And then an event took place which was very important with respect to this attitude. It was the Bogotazo, on the ninth of April, 1948, when a political leader, Gaitan, was shot and the people of Bogotá went raving mad in the streets. I was in my pension ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitan had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that. When I was later forced to go back to Barranquilla on the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood, I realized that that was the type of life I had lived, knew, and wanted to write about.

Around 1950 or '51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn't been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn't really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I'm not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner's could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.

From that trip to the village I came back to write Leaf Storm, my first novel. What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating. From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world. That was in 1953, but it wasn't until 1967 that I got my first royalties after having written five of my eight books.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that it's common for young writers to deny the worth of their own childhoods and experiences and to intellectualize as you did initially?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

No, the process usually takes place the other way around, but if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it's always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says "God help me from inventing when I sing." It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

INTERVIEWER

Whom were you writing for at this point? Who was your audience?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Leaf Storm was written for my friends who were helping me and lending me their books and were very enthusiastic about my work. In general I think you usually do write for someone. When I'm writing I'm always aware that this friend is going to like this, or that another friend is going to like that paragraph or chapter, always thinking of specific people. In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.

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Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69

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Gabriel García Márquez was interviewed in his studio/office located just behind his house in San Angel Inn, an old and lovely section, full of the spectacularly colorful flowers of Mexico City. The studio is a short walk from the main house. A low elongated building, it appea...

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Born in the Colombian village of Aracataca in 1927, Gabriel García Márquez made his mark as a master of the modern novel with the publication of Cien años de soledad in 1967 (published in English as One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1970). His reputation was cemented with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. In this interview he speaks of his personal vision of Latin America and evokes some of the principal themes of his work, in which elements of fantasy and the marvellous mingle with the most banal reality to give everyday life a mythical and universal dimension.
Interview conducted by Manuel Osorio, Peruvian journalist
In Latin America different cultures have come together to create something new and rich. Are Latin Americans aware of this intermixing?
Speaking for myself, I only became aware of it a few years ago, even though my experience as a writer and my frequent contacts with different societies and political systems have increased my understanding of other aspects of Latin American culture. When I was travelling in Africa, I noticed similarities between some forms of popular art there and those of various Caribbean countries. That gave me a clearer understanding of our own cultural situation as well as of the relationship between elements of different cultures generally.

Through such insights, you can discover both what is unique and what is universal in a culture. There is a whole network of links between peoples that they may not necessarily be aware of.
Isn't that the starting-point of your novels? Their main theme, even?
I wasn't really conscious of the multicultural influence when I was writing them. It came to me of its own accord. It was only afterwards that I realized that almost unintentionally there were elements of this cultural mingling in my work, elements that had crept in gradually as I was writing.

In Latin America various influences have mixed and spread across the continent: Western culture, the African presence, even some Oriental elements, all added to the native, pre-Columbian tradition. That's why I don't think one can talk of a Mexican or Colombian culture as such. Speaking personally, I no longer think of myself as Colombian; first and foremost I am Latin American, and proud of it.

I should add that it's a mistake to think of the history of Latin America as starting with the Spanish conquest. That's a colonial viewpoint. We must never forget that the nations forged by the Spanish viceroys were the results of arbitrary decisions from outside, not of our own special needs.

To understand our current problems, we have to go back to the time before the Conquest. The borders that were drawn between the Latin American countries were only created to manipulate us, and still, whenever there's a need for it, the cry of nationalism goes up. Obviously, that only sets us against one another, stops us from seeing and feeling the problems that we have in common. Each country has its own special circumstances, but what really matters is our underlying common identity.
So is there such a thing as a Latin American culture?
I certainly don't think one can say there is a homogeneous Latin American culture. For example in Central America, the Caribbean region, there is an African influence that has resulted in a culture different from that of countries with a sizable indigenous population, like Mexico or Peru. You could make a similar point about many other Latin American countries.

In South America, Venezuela and Colombia have more in common with the Caribbean than with the Andean Indians, even though both countries have an Indian population of their own. In Peru and Ecuador, there is a divergence between the coastal regions and the mountains. Similar situations exist throughout the continent.

These diverse influences come together to give Latin American civilization its special flavour, its uniqueness in relation to the world's other cultures.
What part does Spanish influence play in this context?
There's no denying the strength of Spanish influence in Latin America, and of Portuguese influence in Brazil. It is there in every aspect of our lives. We even speak Castilian Spanish.

It is a very rich influence, if also a controversial one that is often disparaged. Even though the heritage is part of our cultural personality, there is a mistrust of everything Spanish in Latin America that complicates everything and seems to me to be excessive and dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, I am proud to have inherited that culture, I'm not ashamed of it in any way. Spanish colonization is no longer a problem today. It's true that we were created in a way from a European overflow, but we're no mere copy of Europe. Latin America is something else again.
Where did the urge to write come from, the storytelling inspiration that gave us One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera...?
I think it all comes from nostalgia.
Nostalgia for your childhood? For your country?
Nostalgia for my country and for life itself. I had an extraordinary childhood, surrounded by highly imaginative and superstitious people, people who lived in a misty world populated by phantasms. For instance, my grandmother used quite unselfconsciously to tell me stories at night that would make my hair stand on end.
Your grandfather seems to have been something of a family legend. Did he play an important part in your childhood?
He was an enormous old man who seemed to be suspended in time and in memory, and I was very fond of him. He died when I was eight years old, and I was deeply upset. He used to tell me about his life and everything that had happened in the village and the surrounding district since time immemorial. He described in detail the wars he had fought in and the terrible massacres in the banana plantations the year I was born, massacres that left a lasting trace on Colombian history.
Did your mother also influence you as a writer?
She's an enchanting woman. When someone asked her about me, what she attributed her son's talent to, she replied without batting an eyelid "Scott's Emulsion" [a children's tonic]. There's another revealing anecdote. I have several brothers. Well, whenever one of us takes a plane, she lights a candle and says a prayer that everything will be all right. But we're no longer all living at home, and the last time I saw her she told me, "Now I always keep a candle burning, in case one of you takes a plane without my knowing about it".

All my family are very important to me, and they all appear in one way or another in my writings. I never forget that I am the son of an Aracataca postal worker.
Originally you came from the Caribbean, and your books reflect the feverish, overflowing life of the region. Is that where you found the magical realism that has made your work so popular around the world?
In the Caribbean there's a perfect symbiosis - well, let's say one more evident than elsewhere - between the people, daily life and the natural world. I grew up in a village hidden away among marshes and virgin forest on the Colombian north coast. The smell of the vegetation there is enough to turn your stomach.

It's a place the sea passes through every imaginable shade of blue, where cyclones make houses fly away, where villages lie buried under dust and the air burns your lungs. For the Caribbean peoples, natural catastrophe and human tragedy are part of everyday life.

should add that the area is soaked in myths brought over by the slaves, mixed in with Indian legends and Andalusian imagination. The result is a very special way of looking at things, a conception of life that sees a bit of the marvellous in everything. You find it not just in my novels, but also in the works of Miguel Angel Asturias in Guatemala and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba. There's a supernatural side to things, a kind of reality that ignores the laws of reason, just like in dreams.

I once wrote a story about the Pope visiting a remote Colombian village, something that seemed quite impossible at the time. Well, a few years later the Pope visited Colombia.
In view of the influences you've described, the presence of the marvellous throughout your work, do you think critics are justified in describing you as a fantasy writer, as baroque?
In the Caribbean, and in Latin America in general, we consider so-called magical situations part of everyday life, like any other aspect of reality. It seems quite natural to us to believe in portents, telepathy, premonitions, a whole host of superstitions and fantastical ways of coming to terms with reality. I never try to explain or justify such phenomena in my books. I see myself as a realist, pure and simple.
The relationship between Europe and Latin America has always been full of unhelpful misunderstandings. Do you think it's necessary to clarify the relationship and to put ill feeling behind us if we are to reach a new equilibrium between North and South?
The problems our continent faces are so huge that they prevent us from seeing things clearly, even though we are right in the midst of the situation. So it's not surprising if Europe, absorbed by the spectacle of its own culture, lacks adequate means of understanding us. The Europeans have inherited a great rationalist tradition, and it is only to be expected that they should constantly judge us by their own criteria, without taking into account the differences that exist at other latitudes. It's not surprising either if they fail to see that the need for prosperity and a sense of identity is felt just as keenly in Latin America, or in Africa and Asia, as it once was in Europe, and still is today. Even so, any attempt to interpret one part of the world using the criteria of another is bound to lead to terrible misunderstandings, and can only entrap people more deeply in alienation, solitude and isolation.

Europe should try to see us in the light of its own past. It's as if the present imbalance has made it lose sight of the vicissitudes of its own history. Who remembers that it took 300 years to build a wall around London? That Rome wasn't built in a day but over many centuries, or that it was an Etruscan king who took Rome into the arena of history? That Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, was bigger than Paris when the conquistadors arrived?

Europeans of vision, people doing their best to create a more just and humane society across their continent, could really help us if they changed their way of judging us. Any real sympathy with our dreams and hopes should take the form of aid for people whose only ambition is to live their own lives in a world where there is a real sense of human brotherhood.

Why shouldn't the southern nations attempt to copy the solutions the Europeans are adopting in Europe, even if the conditions and methods are different?
Do the problems come from inside or outside the continent?
I think we have to stop pretending to ourselves that all the violence, misery and dissension that afflicts Latin America is the result of a plot hatched thousands of kilometres away, as if we couldn't imagine any other destiny for ourselves than being at the mercy of the global powers.

Confronted with inequality, oppression, exploitation and neglect, our answer must be life itself. Not even centuries of warfare have dimmed its obstinate affirmation. Forty years ago, William Faulkner refused to accept the possibility that mankind might come to an end. Today we know that what he feared is a straightforward scientific possibility. Given that terrible fact, and the knowledge that the links between nations are stronger than ever before and that a new era is dawning, I believe it's not too late to build a utopia that would allow us to share an Earth on which no one would take decisions for other people, and where people on the margins would be given a fresh chance. A world in which solidarity could become a reality.
It's an aspiration that is reflected in your work, bound as it is to Latin America and an awareness of its destiny.
That's right. I don't think one can live with such a nostalgia, try for so long to describe a country or understand a continent, without feeling deeply linked to them, and through them to the entire world.

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Born in the Colombian village of Aracataca in 1927, Gabriel García Márquez made his mark as a master of the modern novel with the publication of Cien años de soledad in 1967 (published in English as One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1970).

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Broadly speaking, there are two types of mystery stories: whodunnits and whydunnits. We read a mystery story to find out who committed the crime (with the why, the motive, often serving to help the investigator find the culprit), or we read knowing from early on who the guilty party is as the story lays out the reasons, psychological and otherwise, that prompted the crime. An intriguing subclass of the whodunit is the inverted detective story. In this type, the howcatchem, the crime, and usually the perpetrator are shown at the story's beginning. The main thrust of the drama here becomes how the detective goes about solving the crime and catching, or killing, the perpetrator. Nearly every episode of Columbo follows this format and, more recently, Luther. But what about a mystery story where, from the first pages, the reader knows who did the crime, why they did it, who they killed and how the person was killed - yet no detective solves anything? In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the setting is a small village in Colombia, South America, and to add to the excess of information known, not only does the reader know all the crime's particulars, but the characters in the story, the village residents, know before the fatal act occurs who will be killed, by whom, and why. Everyone even remotely connected to the killing knows the pertinent facts, with the possible exception of the victim. When all the typical questions that a mystery story answers are answered from the get-go, what kind of mystery is left? What does the narrative's investigator need to investigate? It's precisely these enigmatic areas that are explored in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel.

The story's basic ingredients are simple. On the night of their wedding, Bayardo San Roman discovers that Angela Vicario is not a virgin. Outraged, he immediately brings her back to her family house, where her mother beats her for her transgression. Under the rain of blows, she eventually says that Santiago Nasar, a well-to-do villager, is the man who violated her. Santiago Nasar has no established connection to her at all, but at once, without doing anything to verify her accusation, Angela's twin brothers, Pedro and Pablo, vow to uphold the family's honor. Fulfillment of this duty can come about in only one way - by killing the violator. The brothers mark Santiago Nasar for death, and before dawn, they arm themselves with enormous knives they have used when slaughtering pigs. The catch is that the self-appointed killers don't want to do this deed. Far from hatching a plan in secret, they do everything they can to make their designs known. Armed with their knives the morning of the planned killing, they sharpen the weapons out in the open at the meat market:

...There weren't very many customers that early, but twenty-two people declared they had heard everything said, and they all coincided in the impression that the only reason the brothers had said it was so that someone would come over to hear them...

...Finally, they made the knives sing on the stone, and Pablo laid his beside the lamp so that the steel sparkled.

"We're going to kill Santiago Nasar," he said.

Their reputation as good people was so well-founded that no one paid any attention to them. "We thought it was drunkards' baloney," several butchers declared, just as Victoria Guzman and so many others did who saw them later...

As the hours pass, the brothers repeatedly state their intentions to anyone who will listen. It's clear that they want someone, anyone, to prevent them from going ahead with the killing. By the time the act is about to occur, as the narrator says, "there were very few of us who didn't know that the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, and in addition, the reasons were understood down to the smallest detail." Yet there is no conspiracy, no maliciousness on anyone's part. Nasar lives a well-adjusted life in a house with his loving mother, and it's not as if any townspeople beside the Vicarios want him to die. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, nobody stops the brothers and nobody manages to warn Santiago Nasar. Misunderstandings and miscommunications unfold in a way both funny and horrifying. "There had never been a death more foretold," the narrator says, but in this South American village, foreknowledge stops nothing.

The unnamed narrator functions as the tale's investigator. He was a young man in the town when the killing occurred and relates his chronicle twenty seven years after the events. He has the deadpan tone of a journalist simply trying to assemble the facts and get at the "truth", but the more he learns about what happened, the odder the story becomes. In effect, he's investigating not just a murder committed by two men, but an entire town's complicity in that murder, and by extension, an entire culture with its own very specific mentality.

Time is presented in a fascinating way in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The standard mystery novel investigation proceeds in a linear fashion. The plot may be complex and the past may play a large role in influencing the present, but the detective pushes through the suspects and clues, determined to move forward and make progress in the case. There are false leads, distractions, and obstacles and the detective backtracks when necessary, but the main thrust of the narrative is straight ahead until the detective arrives at the solution. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by contrast, the structure is circular; the narrator tells the tale in such a way that time keeps looping back on itself. Each section begins at a certain point within the few hours that covers the novel's central action, but then the tale goes off into flashbacks and flash forwards, digressions, commentaries on the different people involved. Needless to say, Marquez's craftsmanship is impeccable, and despite all the jumping around, the narrative is extremely tight. In no more than 140 pages, we learn about the histories of numerous characters. We get their backgrounds leading up to the fateful day, and with some, we find out where life took them after the murder. The narrator's journalistic voice is the novel's main one, but often he quotes other people, friends of his from the town, acquaintances. It's a vivid mosaic Marquez creates, a jigsaw puzzle of conflicting perceptions, dreams, thoughts, ambitions, and desires, and the total effect of it all is uncertainty. Yes, we know in great detail exactly what transpired the day Santiago Nasar was killed, but at the same time, somehow, like the people who are part of the drama, we don't understand a damn thing. As the narrator keeps going over the same events from different perspectives, asking questions about this or that incident or encounter, trying to tease out meanings, the story feels more and more dreamlike. The people are like sleepwalkers, or figures moving through a prearranged ritual. While Chronicle of a Death Foretold, strictly speaking, is not a work of magical realism (nothing supernatural happens in it), it ranks among the strangest of Marquez's works specifically because it is based in quotidian "reality" and that reality is inexplicable. Indeed, the narrator describes a judge who writes a 500 page brief about the case but who himself can't grasp its core. The case disturbs the judge because "he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold."

As a matter of fact, the novel does derive from actual events. In 1951, in Sucre, Colombia, a Marquez childhood friend, a medical student from an affluent family, was murdered for supposedly deflowering a young bride. Years later, the man serving as the basis for Bayardo San Roman sued Marquez for using him as that character's model and declared that he should get 50% of the book's royalties and a co-author credit. Litigation lasted for seventeen years. In the end, the court ruled in Marquez's favor on both counts, stating, well, the obvious - that "Hundreds of literary, artistic, and cinematographic works have had as their central story facts from real life", and that the plaintiff should not be credited as co-author because he "could never have employed the literary language that was actually used."

Marquez was in college studying journalism when the murder occurred, and he heard the news about it from a friend who lived in Sucre. In his autobiography, he says that he wanted at once to write a report on the crime. Yet as time passed, his thinking changed and what came to interest him was "no longer the crime itself but the literary theme of collective responsibility". The inverted detective story structure suits this theme perfectly, but what's striking is how thoroughly Marquez subverts even this structure. The traditional inverted mystery poses the investigator with a challenge because the murder committed was well-planned and smoothly executed. The means are elaborate and difficult for the detective to figure out. Often the fun resides in watching the detective work through solving what the arrogant criminal thinks is the perfect murder. But there is no need for deductive brilliance in Chronicle: Marquez's killers are imperfect and inept in every way.

They are also brutal. Marquez saves the murder for the very last scene in the book, and he does not stint on graphic detail:

Actually, Santiago Nasar wasn't falling because they themselves were holding him up with stabs against the door. Desperate, Pablo Vicario gave him a horizontal slash on the stomach, and all his intestines exploded out. Pedro Vicario was about to do the same, but his wrist twisted with horror and he gave him a wild cut on the thigh. Santiago Nasar was still for an instant, leaning against the door, until he saw his own viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees.

The final absurd touch is how, once stabbed repeatedly against his front door, Santiago Nasar picks up his entrails and walks all the way around the side of his house - a good one hundred yards - to enter by the back door. He wipes dirt off his guts, smiles at some neighbors having breakfast, and dies in his kitchen. While this finale strikes one as a Marquez touch, one tragic detail apparently is not. Before the stabbing, as he nears the front door, Santiago Nasar sees his killers waiting for him. He runs for the door to get inside, but his mother shuts and bolts it from within. Though she sees the brothers with their knives, she doesn't see her son approaching from an angle and believes he is already inside, in his bedroom. The victim's own mother unwittingly seals his doom - something that, according to Marquez in his autobiography, happened during the actual murder.

Marquez says that he didn't write the tale of the Sucre murder till thirty years after the events. He wanted to write it well before that, but his mother begged him not to. The victim's mother, alive all that time, was a close friend of Marquez's mother, and his mother remained opposed to a story despite everything Marquez argued. He says "it seemed a lack of respect to write it without her permission". Only after the victim's mother died ("without ever getting over the loss of her son") did Marquez's mother relent, saying he could write the story if he chose to. She never read it, though. As she told Marquez, she had a reason for avoiding it: "Something that turned out so awful in life can't turn out well in a book."

Um, if I might, with all due respect to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mother, about the book he wrote - she was wrong.

Scott Adlerberg lives in New York City. He co-hosts the Word for Word Reel Talks film commentary series each summer at the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival in Manhattan. He blogs about books, movies, and writing at Scott Adlerberg's Mysterious Island. His most recent book is the genre-blending noir\fantasy novella Jungle Horses, available from Broken River Books.

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Criminal Element

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Broadly speaking, there are two types of mystery stories: whodunnits and whydunnits. We read a mystery story to find out who committed the crime (with the why, the motive, often serving to help the investigator find the culprit), or we read knowing from early on who the guilty party is as the story lays out...

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On October 26, 1949, in the city of Cartagena on Colombia's Caribbean coast, a young journalist named Gabriel García Márquez went to the convent of Santa Clara to see its crypt being emptied prior to the building's demolition. When the workers took a pickax to one of the burial niches by the altar, "the stone shattered at the first blow...and a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out of the crypt." The workers eventually brought out more than 20 meters of tresses attached to the skull of a young girl. Watching from a slight distance, García Márquez recalled a story his grandmother told him as a boy: "the legend of a little twelve-year-old marquise with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train, who had died of rabies caused by a dog bite and was venerated in the towns along the Caribbean coast for the many miracles she had performed." Books in Review

The incident was the inspiration for an article he wrote that day for El Universal, the paper where he was then working, and a novel, Of Love and Other Demons, that appeared 45 years later. The story, recounted in the preface to the novel, neatly captures the way fiction and reportage were constantly interwoven across the breadth of García Márquez's career-the way oral traditions, legends, and popular memories and the evidence of his eyes and ears work to nourish and creatively enrich each other, often across many years. In fact, while his novels and stories may have won him global renown, journalism was his first calling. Not only was it foundational to his development as a writer, but it also remained integral to his work and public persona throughout his life, from his early days as a cub reporter in Colombia until his death in Mexico in 2014.

To begin with, it was the journalism that enabled him to make a precarious living while he wrote fiction, often at night. Yet even after the global success of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, he continued to write articles, commentaries, and reported pieces at an impressive rate. In Spanish, his collected Obra Periodística-not including three book-length works of reportage-spans five volumes, comprising more than 3,000 pages. The Scandal of the Century is the first English-language selection from this vast body of work. Long overdue, it provides a fairly representative slice of García Márquez's journalistic output. In the first half, we track his movements across the globe, from 1940s Colombia through a string of international assignments in the '50s and '60s: Rome, Paris, Budapest, Caracas, and Havana, among many others. In the latter half, we find a more rooted García Márquez, largely through the columns he wrote for El País in the '80s from Mexico City, where he lived much of the time from the '70s onward. While it captures the geographical breadth of García Márquez's journalistic work, the book makes some significant omissions that tend to downplay his radical politics. The result is to give us a somewhat truncated view of a writer who told an interviewer in 1978 that "there is no act in my life which is not a political act."

Throughout García Márquez's career, literature and journalism had highly porous boundaries. His fiction and his nonfiction for newspapers and magazines can be seen as facets of a single, lifelong narrative enterprise. Indeed, we might even think of both kinds of writing not as distinct genres, to be shelved separately as fiction and nonfiction, but as reportage in different registers or realms of reality. From that point of view, it's less surprising that García Márquez observed in 1991, "My books are the books of a journalist."

Born in 1927, García Márquez was raised on Colombia's Caribbean coast and then went to secondary school in the highland town of Zipaquirá, near Bogotá. In The Fragrance of Guava, a 1982 set of interviews with his friend the Colombian writer and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he recalled an education with distinct Marxist influences: During breaks, "the algebra teacher would talk to us about historical materialism, the chemistry teacher would lend us books by Lenin and the history teacher would talk about class struggle." He emerged convinced that "socialism was the immediate destiny of humankind." Though he briefly joined a Communist Party cell in his early 20s, he described himself as a sympathizer rather than a militant, and throughout his life, he tried to navigate the tension between close and committed support for the radical left and critical independence from it.

García Márquez started studying law in Bogotá but abandoned his studies in 1948, amid the wave of violence that followed the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the presidential candidate of the Liberal Party. Returning to the coast, García Márquez began his journalistic career at El Universal in Cartagena, and over the next few years, he had spells as a columnist for El Heraldo in Barranquilla before moving back to the capital in 1954 to work for El Espectador.

From early on, García Márquez's journalism showed a recurrent concern with the blurry frontiers between real events on the one hand and legends and literature on the other-and he strongly emphasized how often the former outdo the latter in delirious invention. In a wonderful series from March 1954 on the "strange idolatry" of the people of La Sierpe in coastal Colombia, he writes of the local veneration of a cedar plank supposedly bearing an image of the Virgin Mary in its knots and grain before telling his readers about the town's cult of St. Kidney, a cow organ apparently displaying the face of Jesus. There is, to be sure, an element of gentle mockery in his description of these beliefs, but more telling is the weight he gives them as a genuine expression of what La Sierpe's residents think. For much of humanity, it's the fantastical that helps make sense of reality, not the other way around.

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Soon after his return to Bogotá, García Márquez wrote a short piece that captures his thoughts about the role of journalism in society. The work of a reporter is not simply to transmit facts and information but also to record and participate in the collective discussion of events, a habit that goes back to the dawn of humanity. "Without doubt," he jokes, "the first sensational news produced-after creation-was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise." He then imagines the Fall being retold as a crime story: "An apple was the cause of the tragedy." For García Márquez, the printed word is only the point of departure for those collective discussions. Every town, he insists, has its reporters, amateur as well as professional, who help shift the conversation from the page to the streets: "There will always be a man reading an article in the corner of a drugstore, and there will always-because this is the funny thing-be a group of citizens ready to listen to him, even if just to feel the democratic pleasure of not agreeing with him." From this perspective, journalism and fiction are just different names for the same enterprise of telling and retelling, of contesting and comprehending a community's stories.

García Márquez's stint as a reporter in Bogotá was brief but dramatic. In early 1955, he achieved nationwide renown for a series of interviews with the sailor Luis Alejandro Velasco, the sole survivor of a shipwreck who became a national hero. The Colombian Navy's official story was that his ship sank because of a storm. But from García Márquez's gripping reports-eventually collected and published in 1970 as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor-it became clear that the ship had been overburdened by the goods the crew was bringing illegally from the United States. The series landed García Márquez in hot water with the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, and as a precaution, in July 1955 he persuaded El Espectador to send him to Europe as the newspaper's roving correspondent.

Based at first in Italy, García Márquez produced, among other things, a long series of articles under the rubric "The Scandal of the Century" about the case of Wilma Montesi, a young Italian woman who died under suspicious circumstances. As the investigation into her death unfolds, we are given a portrait of 1950s Italian society, in which traditional Catholic mores came increasingly into conflict with a fast-​living culture of glamour and celebrity.

From Rome, García Márquez moved to Paris, where he immediately found himself stranded without a job: At the start of 1956, Rojas Pinilla shuttered El Espectador and other oppositional newspapers in the name of a "free but responsible press." By this time, most of Latin America was under the rule of right-wing authoritarians, and García Márquez chose to stay in Europe, falling in with a growing number of Latin American exiles who had fled the ever more stifling political climate in their countries and were now clustered in cheap hotels on the Left Bank. He later recalled one of his neighbors, the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, leaning out of his window one day and shouting, "The man has fallen!" The various exiles in the neighborhood perked their ears, hoping that Guillén was talking about their dictator. (In this case, it was Argentina's Juan Domingo Perón.)

García Márquez's time in Paris coincided, of course, with France's ferocious counterinsurgency in Algeria and its repression of anticolonial activism within its own borders. The Paris police zealously targeted anyone they thought looked like an Arab, and García Márquez recalled being dragged to jail several times during police roundups of Algerians. As a result, he made friends with members of the Algerian National Liberation Front, who suggested that he might as well be guilty of helping them if he was going to get arrested anyway and put him to work for their cause. Hence García Márquez could later truthfully claim that "the Algerian Revolution is the only one for which I've actually been imprisoned."

In these years, he made two politically formative trips to the Eastern Bloc-the first, in 1955, to Poland and Czechoslovakia and the second, in 1957, to East Germany, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. His reports on these journeys are especially rich and fascinating, recording his first encounters with actually existing socialism. He was on the whole quite positive about his time in the USSR, but his experiences in Hungary and East Germany convinced him, as he put it later, that "what they had in the so-called people's democracies was not authentic socialism" because "it was a system imposed from the outside by the Soviet Union through dogmatic local communist parties with no imagination."

While in Budapest, García Márquez managed to elude his minders and wander the streets of a city still scarred by the crushing of the 1956 popular uprising by Soviet tanks. "Almost a year after the events that stirred the world," he wrote, "Budapest is still a provisional city. I saw extensive sectors where the streetcar tracks have not been replaced and which are still closed to traffic. The crowds, badly dressed, sad...stand in endless lines to buy basic necessities. The stores that were destroyed and looted are still being rebuilt." García Márquez visited taverns in a working-class neighborhood, where he found "the seed of the uprising" still alive "despite the military regime, the Soviet intervention and the apparent tranquility that reigns." (Sadly not included in The Scandal of the Century is his perceptive portrait of János Kádár's regime, installed after the Soviet intervention, in which García Márquez displayed sympathy with the uprising as well as an understanding of the political dilemmas it created for those whose opposition to domination from Moscow didn't mean they wished for a return of the reactionary ancien régime.)

García Márquez's dispatches from behind the Iron Curtain were written for Momento, a magazine edited from Caracas by Mendoza, and at the end of 1957, he moved to the Venezuelan capital to work on staff at the magazine. He arrived just in time to witness the fall of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in January 1958. Later that year, García Márquez wrote, "Venezuela was the freest country in the entire world." His descriptions of it evoke not only a chaotic, festive atmosphere but also an example of radically democratic mass politics: "Each time the government glimpsed some danger, it immediately consulted the people by direct channels, and the people took to the streets against any attempt at regression. The most delicate official decisions were made in the public arena." Inspiring as this may have been for someone of García Márquez's socialist sympathies, however, it turned out to be only the prelude to a still more dramatic revolutionary upheaval that began in Cuba the next year.

For García Márquez as for many Latin Americans of his generation, the Cuban Revolution was a political watershed: It shaped allegiances and drew ideological battle lines across the region for decades to come. This was as much because of the hemispheric chain reactions it generated as because of what happened in Cuba itself. For the radical left, the island was a bridgehead in the struggle to dismantle the region's centuries-​old inequalities. For local elites and the United States, Cuba set a dangerous precedent that had to be smashed in the name of anti-​communism. What García Márquez saw in Cuba was the possibility of a different kind of socialism, one that escaped the coercion and gray bureaucracy he had witnessed in the Eastern Bloc and that was made to Latin American specifications-what he called "a human and visible socialism, that you can touch with your hands."

García Márquez traveled to Cuba less than three weeks after the fall of the military strongman Fulgencio Batista, which in many ways appeared to be a replay of the scenes he witnessed in Venezuela 12 months earlier. "For those of us who had lived in Caracas for all of the previous year," he wrote in an article reflecting on his first encounter with the Cuban Revolution, "the feverish atmosphere and creative disorder of Havana at the beginning of 1959 was not a novelty." The Scandal of the Century contains two later pieces devoted to Cuba, which retrospectively convey his enthusiasm for the carnival atmosphere of the revolution's early stages as well as his keen eye for detail. At one point, he describes how some Cuban soldiers who hadn't sided with Fidel Castro's rebels initially confined themselves to their barracks so that they could grow their beards and pretend to have been barbudos all along.

He soon found himself acting as a participant-observer. From September 1960 to May 1961, García Márquez worked for Prensa Latina, the press agency set up by the new government in Havana, helping to establish its bureau in New York as well as shuttling between Colombia and the Cuban capital, where he worked alongside other giants of radical journalism such as Rodolfo Walsh. (It was Walsh who uncovered the US plans to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; he would be murdered by the Argentine military dictatorship in 1977.) But by the middle of 1961, García Márquez had started to become uneasy with the increasing sway of the Cuban Communist Party over the island's new revolutionary institutions. Rather than risk a confrontation, in which he might end up tarred as a counterrevolutionary, he opted to take some distance: "I marginalized myself in silence," he later told Mendoza, "while I kept writing my books."

García Márquez's first novel, Leaf Storm, was published shortly before he left Colombia in 1955, with a small print run, and it received little attention. It was followed by two more novels, No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour, and a collection of stories, Big Mama's Funeral. But it was the years after his 1961 departure from Cuba that proved most significant for his career as a writer of fiction. He settled in Mexico, where he began working on a novel inspired by the trials of former officials of the Batista regime that he witnessed in Cuba before switching to a subject closer to his heart: the wondrous world of his childhood on Colombia's Caribbean coast.

Written in the mid-'60s and published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude catapulted him to global fame. Translated into dozens of languages, the book had an immediate and profound impact on fiction across the world. Its astonishing success allowed him to become less a journalist who wrote fiction than a novelist who happened to write journalism. From now on, the balance between his two callings would be reversed-but he would continue to pursue them both.

Even as García Márquez attained global renown as a writer of fiction, neither his journalism nor his radical commitments tailed off. In fact, in the '70s, quite the opposite was true. He remained a firm supporter of Cuba throughout the '60s, and even though he broke with Castro over the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, publicly condemning the crushing of the Prague Spring, he stayed committed to the Cuban Revolution as a model for Latin American socialists. In the years after 1968, however, he engaged more actively with the radical left in the rest of the region and began to widen his geographical range far beyond it, devoting increasing attention to liberation movements in the developing world and to groups resisting the right-wing dictatorships that had seized power in most of Latin America. Chile loomed especially large in his thinking: The toppling of Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet in 1973 in a US-​sponsored coup was a dark threshold for the Latin American left, confirming that local elites and Washington would not hesitate to dispense with democracy. In its wake, García Márquez announced that he would write no more fiction until Pinochet was gone, describing Allende's fall as "a personal catastrophe for me." (At this point he had already finished The Autumn of the Patriarch, which appeared in 1975, but owing to the dictator's firm grip on power, García Márquez eventually broke his promise, publishing Chronicle of a Death Foretold in 1981.)

García Márquez threw himself into editorial work, cofounding the left-wing magazine Alternativa in Bogotá in 1974, which aimed to weaken the long-standing hold on the media by Colombia's elites. The first issue was impounded by the police, and a year later paramilitaries bombed the magazine's offices, but it survived until 1980, providing García Márquez with an outlet for some of his finest political reporting. This included a fiery piece about the fall of Allende, interviews with CIA whistle-​blower Philip Agee and with Chilean and Argentine leftist guerrillas, and his celebrated account of the 1975 Cuban intervention in Angola, "Operation Carlota." There were also pieces on Vietnam and a richly evocative portrait of Portugal in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which reminded him of Havana in 1959 (down to the profusion of military uniforms and facial hair).

It is striking that this period of heightened creativity and political activity gets so little space in The Scandal of the Century. Though the '70s take up almost an entire volume of his collected journalism in Spanish and spill over into another one, here we are given only two pieces on Cuba, from 1977 and 1978, in which he reflects on the early days of the revolution and discusses the ongoing impact of the US blockade, and a 1978 report on the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua's National Palace in Managua. The effect is a dramatic scaling back of our sense of García Márquez's political commitments-their intensity and urgency as well as their geographical breadth and their significance in his political and intellectual development.

Instead, The Scandal of the Century gives us a rather different kind of figure, devoting a third of its pages to the columns that García Márquez wrote for El País in the '80s. Though lively and often entertaining, these tend to be slighter pieces and are much less politically engaged. Still, there are flashes of telling detail. In one column he describes a chalkboard that hung from the balcony of El Espectador 's offices in Bogotá in the 1930s and 40s with news updates written on it that attracted crowds that blocked traffic, applauded news they liked, and whistled at news they didn't. "It was a form of active and immediate participation," he notes. And in another we find García Márquez expressing his frustration with the way the brutal personalities and outlandish foibles of Latin America's dictators continually outpaced the ingenuity of even the most creative novelists: "Latin American and Caribbean writers have to admit, hands on hearts, that reality is a better writer than we are."

The '80s brought the consolidation of García Márquez's place in the global literary firmament. In 1982 he was awarded a Nobel Prize; in 1985 he published Love in the Time of Cholera and in 1989 The General in His Labyrinth. Yet even as his status as Latin America's preeminent fiction writer was being consecrated, he reaffirmed the centrality of the reporter's craft to his work. In a column written the year before he was given the Nobel Prize, he argues that "there is not a single line in any of my books that does not have its origin in a real event." Published that year, Chronicle of a Death Foretold describes a murder that took place in 1951 in the northern Colombian town of Sucre and reconstructs the tragic chain of events from eyewitness testimony and by interrogating the narrator's memories of those times. He deploys the same techniques in his 1986 Clandestine in Chile, an account of a covert trip made by film director Miguel Littín to a country still under the brutal rule of Pinochet. Even García Márquez's 2002 memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, is as much a work of journalism as an example of lyrical autobiography. He drew on his childhood recollections and interviewed family members and friends, as if doing a piece of sleuth work on himself. For him, the story to be pieced together was always interwoven with the social world in which it took place-and both had to be part of the telling. This time the subject was himself: After years of writing about others, his investigative eye was turned inward, the reporter fused with the reported.

García Márquez's journalism almost always unfolded in the realm of print, of text on paper-seemingly a far cry from the digitized media landscape of today. Yet in his pursuit of fiction and reportage as parallel modes of collective storytelling, he explored phenomena we would find highly familiar: the blurring of genre boundaries, the feedback loops created between ongoing events and media depictions of them, the uncertain status of facts and memories.

Perhaps the most sustained demonstration of García Márquez's mastery of these themes came late in life, with his 1996 News of a Kidnapping, which recounts the ordeals of several Colombian journalists kidnapped by the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. As well as a portrayal of a country in crisis, racked by multiple forms of violence, it evokes the pervasive role of the media in contemporary life and in the process finds García Márquez putting his own profession under the microscope. Movingly recording the physical and psychological strains the journalists endured in captivity, he notes the ambiguous role that news outlets played throughout the kidnapping-providing a constant stream of information, updating the public in real time, conveying coded messages to the hostages, and raising the pressure on Colombia's politicians to yield to the kidnappers' demands. Ultimately, journalists were not only the victims at the heart of the story or observers as it developed but also participants in its making.

At one point in News of a Kidnapping, García Márquez delivers a brief aside that journalism is "power without a throne, luckily." In the context of the book, he seems to mean power unburdened by the trappings and corruptions of political office. This is perhaps a curious assertion coming from a man who, as a journalist, spent a good deal of time in proximity to power and established friendships with Fidel Castro and François Mitterrand, among others. But I think he meant something else, too: that journalism's power lies in its ability to speak from no fixed place. The power of the journalist comes from being able to float freely in the narrative medium that surrounds us, recording and reporting the news but also shaping the way we remember and speak about it. Throughout his career, García Márquez consistently sought to use that freedom, ranging back and forth between reportage and fiction, in order to show us how we might make it our own.

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The Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez

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On October 26, 1949, in the city of Cartagena on Colombia's Caribbean coast, a young journalist named Gabriel García Márquez went to the convent of Santa Clara to see its crypt being emptied prior to the building's demolition.

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While magical realist stories from around the world can vary greatly in tone, context and content, they share some common elements. Identifying these features can help you differentiate between magical realism and other kinds of imaginative writing.

Take a look at some of the characteristics below. You may be surprised to learn that you've already read magical realism without even realizing it!

Elements of the magical and the mundane are interwoven seamlessly, making it impossible to determine where reality ends and the extraordinary begins.

The story is set in an otherwise ordinary world, with familiar historical and/or cultural realities. Story events are not always explained by universal laws or familiar logic.

The ordinary aspects of the story are what produce the greatest magic.

Objects and settings within the story may take on lives of their own in a way that is ordinary to the characters in the story.

Constructs of time do not follow typical Western conventions. For instance, stories may be told in spiraling shapes rather than in straight lines.

The story, as it unfolds, gives the reader a sense of being inside a puzzle or maze.

Contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities color the point of view, making you question what you understand about the world at large, as well as what happens inside the story.

A metamorphosis takes place in the story. It's treated not as a miracle, but as an everyday event.

The story bears the influences of oral tradition: fables, myths, tall tales, urban legends, a charmed storytelling narrator (who may or may not be reliable).

The magical elements in the story may enhance a subversive message or personalized point of view. Often the point of view is revealed through voices, ideas, and places which exist outside the mainstream or majority perspective.

Magic occurs without using devices typical to the fantasy genre unless the devices (i.e. ghosts, angels) are employed in a context that makes them ordinary. Ghosts or angels may exist in a magical realist story, for instance, but not in a way that is surprising or unusual to the characters in the book.

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While magical realist stories from around the world can vary greatly in tone, context and content, they share some common elements. Identifying these features can help you differentiate between magical realism and other kinds of imaginative writing. Take a look at some of the characteristics below.

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Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87 (Published 2014)

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Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation.

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García Márquez: A Witch Writing - First 11 minutes

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Well, I kept reading the book, and I would say to myself, this is a classic work. This is a - and it kept going on.

And then I would say, by God, there's an abundance of it. It just doesn't end. And it's a - it's classic. It's classic. And when I was finished with it, I was baffled as to how to review it, because it was so phenomenally impressive to me, that I - it - the story was so complex.

And it takes - takes you over, you know, 100 years in a family and in a society that stands for everything. And it was a - it was a believable, credible story. He turned the fables or the myths of our lives and the myths, the great - the Greek myths, the Irish myths, the Spanish myths, and made it everyday currency in the lives of these people that he invented.

It wasn't mystical. It wasn't improbable. It wasn't a fairy tale. It was, the ghosts walked, and the ghosts disappeared, and they would come back, and they grow old. And it was just a very natural progression of life, and told in these wonderful anecdotes that he strung together to create this world and this family of the Buendias. It was like nothing else.

I mean, when you read the book, you have never read a book like this before.

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Remembering Gabriel Garcia Marquez, storyteller who resonated with readers around the world

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Spanish-language author and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez drew worldwide admiration for the poetic style and magical realism of his many novels and stories. Marquez died Thursday in Mexico City at the age of 87. Hari Sreenivasan talks to writer William Kennedy, a long-time acquaintance of Marquez.

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a short and sweet novella that is a must-read for the magical realist genre. Its opening paragraph is an attention grabber that makes the mind ponder to read more.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez narrates the story from the perspective of a native small town boy, returning twenty seven years after the brutal murder of Santiago Nasar. Throughout the story, the events leading up to Santiago's death are replayed over and over again by different people in the town. A young newlywed woman, Angela Vicario claims that Santiago took her virginity so in an attempt to regain the family's reputation back her twin brothers plot to kill Santiago. Although everyone knows Santiago is going to be killed, all the townspeople fail to warn him. He is a mystery throughout the novella but the narrator claims he was innocent of the crime he was murdered for. One thing is clear through the confused words spoken directly before his death, he had no knowledge of why he was being killed.
The novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold was an enjoyable novella written in the genre of magical realism. The genre made the novella enticing because it uses a warped timeline and simple events that happen in an extraordinary way. It is exciting to know what is going to happen but the question, how is it going to happen keeps the reader intrigued in the novella. By knowing the outcome of the novella it leave the reader with many questions including why Santiago Nasar and why didn't anyone warn him. he repeated foretelling of the crime helps build the suspense in the novella leaving the reader wanting more.

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a short and sweet novella that is a must-read for the magical realist genre. Its opening paragraph is an attention grabber that makes the mind ponder to read more.

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CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, By Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Translated by Gregory Rabassa. 120 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $10.95.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ is known for his short stories and novels, especially ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' which has magical vitality and a great abundance of remarkable characters and incidents. He is also known as the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. His new novel, ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold,'' which is very strange and brilliantly conceived, is a sort of metaphysical murder mystery in which the detective, Garcia Marquez himself, reconstructs events associated with the murder 27 years earlier of Santiago Nasar, a rich, handsome fellow who lived in the Caribbean town where the author grew up. Thus, as a character in his own novel, Garcia Marquez interviews people who remember the murder and studies documents assembled by the court. He accumulates many kinds of data - dreams, weather reports, gossip, philosophical speculation - and makes a record of what happened first, second, third, etc. In short, a chronicle.

It emerges that virtually everyone in town knew Santiago Nasar was to be murdered, who would do it, where, when and why. Given so much foreknowledge, the mystery is how the murder could have happened. Some townspeople try to stop the murder. Others are so awed by their foreknowledge that they look upon Santiago Nasar, even as he stands before them, as dead. One person, his father's aging mistress, would like to kill him herself, but the two men who feel obliged to murder him as a matter of honor actually pity him and want to be stopped. They advertise their intention, become spectacularly drunk and flaunt terrible knives. ''They were like children,'' says a witness. Not really guilty, just hideously effective despite themselves. Only children can do everything, says the witness. In contrast to them, nobody else can do even one effective thing to prevent the murder.

Garcia Marquez, a good friend of Santiago Nasar, is identified with him, even mistaken for him by Santiago Nasar's old, dying mother, in a brief hallucination. But when the murder occurs, Garcia Marquez is out of things, recovering from wedding festivities of the previous night. He remembers being awakened from sleep, ''in the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes'' by ''the clamor of alarm bells.'' Therein he is further identified with the victim, because Maria Alejandrina Cervantes was once Santiago Nasar's great passion. She is a magnificent, animalish whore whose lap is ''apostolic'' in that it carries a message of erotic faith to the town, what Garcia Marquez calls ''the disorder of love.'' The phrase names the circumstantial context of the murder and specifies its motive.

This is apparent insofar as the murder is associated with a wedding, an alleged seduction, a whore and a night of general debauch. Specifically, Santiago Nasar is murdered because he was accused of having deflowered the bride, whose husband had been confident that she was a virgin. Prior to the wedding day and even during the night-long festivities that follow, Santiago amuses himself by trying to figure out how much the celebration will cost, unaware that it will cost him his life. Meanwhile, in the middle of the night, the bride is returned to her mother's home in disgrace.Beaten by her mother, delirious with fatigue and pain, she names Santiago Nasar as her corrupter, and her two brothers set out to do the crime of honor.

Though Santiago Nasar is a gun collector, a ''killer of innocent animals'' and an arrogant, lascivious womanizer, nobody knows how he could have seduced the bride. On the other hand, Garcia Marquez offers no cogent reason to suppose he didn't. The murder, then, is motivated but never clearly justified. It remains inexorable and mysterious, and it is oddly complicated by the perverse psychology of the bride and her groom, Bayardo San Roman, a man who simply appeared in town one day.

VERY wealthy and foppish, Bayardo San Roman has supernatural talents and an indeterminate history. His bride is distinguished by her ''poverty of spirit.'' The disorder of love applies to his interest in her, which is sudden, tremendous and absolute. She doesn't love him at all, but after she is returned home in disgrace, and after Santiago Nasar is murdered, she undergoes an extraordinary conversion and discovers in herself a love for Bayardo San Roman as tremendous and inexplicable as his for her.

Among many indeterminacies - was the weather ''radiant'' or ''funereal'' on the fatal day? was Bayardo a homosexual? was he the devil? was it Santiago Nasar who deflowered the bride? - it is curious to discover a mere inconsistency. I'll approach it gradually, then treat it as a clue to the horrific comedy, which intensifies in the concluding chapters. As more and more is revealed about the murder, less and less is known, yet the style of the novel is always natural and unselfconscious, as if innocent of any paradoxical implication.

Like everyone else, Santiago Nasar had foreknowledge of his murder, but it comes in an obscure manner - dreams bearing symbolic anticipations of death. He told his dreams to his mother who ''had a well earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided they were told her before eating.'' She doesn't notice ''any ominous augury'' and, for this reason, ''never forgave herself and succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of eating pepper cress seeds.''

The joke, mixing the uncanny and the banal, displays Garcia Marquez's ironical spirit, but more notable is the fact that Santiago Nasar's mother fails him more seriously than the joke admits. Not only doesn't she notice auguries, but, when her son is pursued by his murderers, she notices only them, not him, and she bars the door to the house. He pounds on the door. She doesn't open it. Thus, inadvertently, she guarantees that he is butchered ''like a pig.''

NOW the inconsistency. In the first chapter, Garcia Marquez says of Santiago Nasar, ''The last image his mother had of him was of his fleeting passage through the bedroom. ... So she would remember him forever.'' As if to emphasize the memory, Garcia Marquez then says, ''He waved goodbye and left the room. It was the last time she saw him.'' But in the final chapter, after barring the door and sealing his fate, his mother goes up to a balcony from which she sees ''Santiago Nasar in front of the door face down in the dust trying to rise up out of his own blood.'' Not the image ''she would remember,'' maybe, but it is the last image, the last time she sees him.

If inconsistency, in life and novels, bespeaks the unthinkable, then Garcia Marquez's inconsistency here is expressive - deliberately or not. After all, the subject of the novel is the unthinkable. All of us will be mysteriously murdered, in the sense that we don't know why we must die. Any effort to explain or rationalize our fate - especially in the linearity of a chronicle -must collapse into the absurd. Commenting on the mood of the town, Garcia Marquez says, ''For years we couldn't talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single anxiety.'' Largely considered, his novel imitates this experience of the town.

When Santiago Nasar's poor mother becomes instrumental in his murder by barring the door, the moment is comic. Then Garcia Marquez sends her up to the balcony and makes her see what she has done, which is more than she would remember. (But then how else does chronicler Garcia Marquez find out about it?) The moment is still formally comic, but very painful, not at all funny, and it smacks of authorial sadism. In the splendid simplicity of its conception, so does the whole novel, since it is built upon a gruesome murder that is dangled before the reader, like a suspended sculpture spinning slowly in a breeze.

TOWARD the end, chapter by chapter, Santiago Nasar's murder is repeatedly presented, each time with increasing ferocity. But first it is prefigured in the kitchen of his house, while Santiago Nasar watches a servant butcher rabbits for lunch, ''surrounded by panting dogs.'' He is soon similarly butchered, and the same dogs arrive at his autopsy, panting, ravenous, eager to be fed his bowels as they were fed the rabbits'. At the autopsy, the murder spins by again in lavish detail. The pathologist actually says, ''It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead.'' Then comes the murder itself, and the wounds described in the autopsy are dynamically recreated in the course of being inflicted. Ultimately, Santiago Nasar is murdered more than anyone ever has been - more often, by more people, in more ways.

Generated by the disorder of love, the murder is associated with sexual passion, even in its prefiguration. After watching the rabbits being disemboweled, Santiago Nasar seizes a young woman by the crotch. Sexual passion is also felt in the compulsive rhythm of the novel, as it moves from one murderous description to the next; however grossly sensual or exquisitely harrowing any passage seems, Garcia Marquez - and the reader too, presumably -wants more.

The descriptions are sometimes gluttonously graphic (the dogs), sometimes quite disgusting (Santiago Nasar walks about bleeding with his bowels in his hands), and, in one telling, a strangely beautiful lyricism appears: ''Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear.''

The murder of Santiago Nasar will stand among the innumerable murders of modern literature as one of the best and most powerfully rendered, superior even to the great, slow murder of Quilty in ''Lolita,'' or the sensational and bathetic murder of the German soldier in ''Mr. Sammler's Planet,'' or various murders in Camus, Sartre, Capote, Mailer and others. Flannery O'Connor's deftly stunning murders in ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' compete well against Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she too is a genius of the uncanny and the banal.

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CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, By Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Translated by Gregory Rabassa. 120 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $10.95. GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ is known for his short stories and novels, especially ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' which has magical vitality and a great abundance of remarkable characters and incidents.

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Gender construction in Latin America has often been cited as being significantly influenced by Spanish colonization. Dominant conceptions of masculinity and femininity, referred to as machismo and marianismo respectively, are rooted in the Spanish conquest and influence the sociocultural conditions of Latin America. There is debate as to the relationship, relevance, changes, and influences of the extremes of machismo and marianismo.

Machismo Defined

Machismo is a form of masculinity that asserts the dominance and superiority of males in society. The term is traced to the Spanish word macho, which means "male" or "manly." It could also refer to being courageous, valorous, and having gender pride.

Although these may be positive connotations, the term machismo is used negatively referring to extreme masculinity encouraged by structures in society. Male dominance and superiority are further legitimized by cultural values and norms.

Machismo is characterized by hypervirility or aggressive masculine behavior expected of males in Latin societies. The machos embody physical strength, courage, self-confidence, heightened sexual power, and bold advances toward women.

Machos believe in the superiority of men over women and also adhere to conservative gender roles. The men, for example, can seek extramarital affairs while the women are expected to be faithful. Women do not have the right to participate in traditionally male positions in society.

Men occupy the public sphere-the arena of politics, economy, or military-and women occupy the private sphere. Women are expected to stay at home and attend to the needs of their husband and children, to take care of the housework, and to oversee other domestic needs. The main roles of women are to be mothers and wives.

Historical Context

The origins of machismo in Latin societies come from Spanish traditions. Patriarchy emphasizes nobility, chivalry, swordsmanship, horsemanship, and formal education. Ties with nobles and crusaders are also given great importance.

In Mexico, the origins of machismo are also associated with the Spanish conquest and the conquistadores' exploitation of natives. This is the period in Mexican history when Hernán Cortés and the conquistadores set out to convert indigenous populations. The image of the conquistador, who courageously conquered despite being outnumbered, is retained as the prototype of the modern macho male.

Likewise, the colonial economic system inculcated a dichotomized sexual division of labor. Men and women existed in separate social spheres.

Archetypes of Machismo

Author and researcher R. A. Andrade summarizes the four archetypes of machismo that can be found in scholarly and popular literature: the conqueror macho, the playboy macho, the masked macho, and the authentic macho. The conqueror macho exemplifies invincibility and extreme bravery in facing dangerous situations.

Exaggerated sexual potency is one of the characteristics of this archetype. Examples of conqueror machos are gunslingers, or pistoleros. Conqueror machos are generally ruthless and bloodthirsty, and they demand power and break laws. They are the negative sides of this archetype.

The playboy macho illustrates males who are permitted to act in a sexually aggressive manner toward females. Sexual, physical, and mental abuses of females are accepted. This chauvinistic archetype is based on the idea of man's biological, social, and intellectual superiority over females. Men are thus allowed to engage in pleasures such as chasing women and adultery.

The masked macho is the third and less common archetype of machismo. A masked macho exemplifies a man who uses a mask of deceit to hide his real intentions. A masked macho often fights for the oppressed. The legendary Pancho Villa is an example.

The last archetype is the authentic macho, a man who is a responsible husband and father. The authentic macho is seen as a more balanced individual who adheres to honor, respect, strength, dignity, and protection of the family. Focused on earning the respect of family and community, this type is not popularized in literature, legends, or movies.

Marianismo: Historical Context

Machismo and marianismo are terms that are linked to the culture in Latin America. Marianismo is the female equivalent of machismo and considered to be the embodiment of the feminine. It is characterized by hyperfeminine behavior.

Similar to machismo, marianismo is traced back to the time of the Spanish conquest and may have been a reaction to machismo. The roots of marianismo also reside in Roman Catholic theology. It is related to all the elements of Marian devotion seen in various cultural patterns in Latin America.

Marian devotion has a long history in colonial New Spain and the independent nation of Mexico. In 1519 Hernán Cortés arrived in Veracruz under the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and the Virgin Mary. In 1531 Juan Diego had a vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, to the northeast of Mexico City.

The Virgin of Guadalupe became the key symbol of Mexican identity in the mid-17th century. Our Lady of Guadalupe was further proclaimed by the church as patroness of Mexico in 1754 and in 1900 proclaimed the patroness of the Americas.

Although historical controversies exist in these accounts, the Virgin Mary played an important role in the Catholic religion and Mexican culture. After almost five centuries of Marian devotion, pilgrimages continue to be important to Mexican culture.

Marian devotion is evident in the frequency with which girls are named in honor of the Virgin. In fact, María (with or without an additional name) is the most common baptismal name for women in Mexico, and even men may be called José María.

Marianismo and the Virgin Mary

The marianismo ideal is modeled after the image of the Virgin Mary and connotes saintliness and submissiveness. Given the title Mother of God, the Virgin Mary is venerated and admired for being spiritually immaculate and eternally giving.

This eventually created a conception of femininity in Mexico and in other Latin American countries-a combination of both a good and a bad woman. This is reflected in the dichotomy of the virgin and the whore.

The basis of the marianismo ideal is Mary's acceptance of God's will and her purity (virginity). In Mexico, where marianismo is strong, the Virgin Mary symbolizes the good mother in contrast to the bad woman Malinche, who was Cortés's lover.

Marianismo expects women to model themselves after Mary and to accept their roles as mothers and wives. Women should be pure, humble, emotional, kind, compliant, vulnerable, unassertive, and enduring of suffering. Women live in the shadow of their husbands and children and should support them continuously.

This kind of attitude involves the expectation that women should tolerate certain behavior of men such as their aggressiveness, sexual infidelity, arrogance, stubbornness, and callousness. The expectations that a woman should be an ideal wife and mother require her to be spiritually superior.

Marianismo as a Strategy

Evelyn Stevens is credited for coining the term marianismo. Stevens turned marianismo into a strategy whereby women benefit from the ideal of women as semidivine, morally superior, and spiritually stronger than men.

The women's movement led to the evolution of marianismo into a cult of feminine superiority. The power in marianismo comes from women's ability to produce life. By tolerating the husband's behavior and wickedness, women receive validation from society and from God.

Men's wickedness, therefore, is the necessary precondition of woman's superior status. This means that to uphold their semidivine status, women should not attempt to avoid suffering and self-sacrifice. Instead, women make this suffering known and thus gain esteem and admiration from society.

On the other hand, marianismo as a strategy is criticized by Tracy Ehlers, who criticized Stevens's position on four grounds.

First she criticized the idea that marianismo is a companion and complement to machismo.

Second, she disagrees with the assumption that women are content with domesticity and the feminine power at home.

Third, she points out that the marianismo ideal blames women for a man's bad behavior because the women need that behavior to attain their status as wife and mother.

Fourth, she argues that the marianismo ideal creates a universal model that encompasses all Latin American women.

Changes in the Marianismo Ideal
The socialist revolution in Cuba led to changes in the marianismo ideals. The Virgin Mary was replaced by the ideal of the equal and working woman.

The Caribbean island of Cuba was a Spanish colony until 1898, but after winning its independence, it became, in practice, a U.S. colony. The Cuban revolution began on January 1, 1959, when the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro forced the former dictator to leave the country. A few years later, Cuba proclaimed itself a socialist country, accompanying an economic blockade from the United States.

These political changes involve the creation of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) in the early years of the revolution. The organization aimed to fulfill women's rights in line with the revolutionary ideals.

Today Cuba is the only country in Latin America with legalized abortion and free contraceptives. The Family Code in 1975 also established by law that men and women have equal responsibility in household work.

The political changes in Cuba regarding gender are still juxtaposed with the traditional gender roles and the prevailing norms of heterosexuality and the nuclear family. The traditional values of women's roles as mothers and wives as concerned with love, marriage, and the family are still present in Cuban socialist society.

Women are still responsible for not getting pregnant. This implies that the mixture of machismo culture and radical changes toward socialism and equal rights continue to exist in the Cuban society.

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Machismo and Marianismo in Latin America

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Gender construction in Latin America has often been cited as being significantly influenced by Spanish colonization. Dominant conceptions of masculinity and femininity, referred to as machismo and marianismo respectively, are rooted in the Spanish conquest and influence the sociocultural conditions of Latin America.

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On the day they were going to kill him, Cayetano Gentile Chimento got up oblivious to his impending murder. Within hours the dashing Colombian medical student was dead, repeatedly stabbed for allegedly deflowering another man's bride.

Few would today remember the 1951 murder, but for the intervention of one of Latin America's best-loved authors. The killing served as the inspiration for Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold - a 1981 classic that cemented the author's reputation as a literary master.

But Márquez's blend of fact and fiction also led to accusations that he had unlawfully misappropriated the life-story of another man and prompted a lawsuit by Miguel Reyes Palencia, who claimed that Márquez had based the novel's main character, Bayardo San Román, on his life.

This week those accusations were finally dismissed as a supreme court in the Colombian city of Barranquilla ruled that Palencia had no right to compensation. The case against Márquez was first brought in 1994, when Palencia claimed that the 1982 Nobel literature laureate had unlawfully used his life story as the basis for Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Palencia demanded 50% of the book's royalties as well as a co-author credit.

Márquez's book tells the story of Bayardo San Román, a wealthy Colombian who Palencia said was modelled on him.

In the novel San Román weds Angela Vicario, a beautiful local girl, only to send her back to her family in disgrace after discovering that she is not a virgin.

Vicario's family, livid at their daughter's rejection, force her to name the man who took her virginity. She accuses Santiago Nasar.

Nasar, who is based on Chimento, is subsequently killed by her drunken brothers, who repeatedly stab him with butchers' knives.

While Márquez has long admitted his book was inspired by Palencia's family history and the murder of Chimento, the author argued that the names and the rest of the book's plot were the fruits of his own imagination.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the court agreed. "Hundreds of literary, artistic, and cinematographic works have had as their central story facts from real life, which have been adapted to the creator's perspective, without this being an impediment to [the author's right] to claim economic rights over them."

The court also dismissed Palencia's demand to be credited as a co-author. "Mr Miguel Reyes Palencia could never have told the story as the writer Gabriel García Márquez did, and could never have employed the literary language that was actually used. The work is characterised by its originality."

Speaking to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, Márquez's lawyer, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, celebrated the verdict.

"This ruling is important, because it helps enhance the central thesis, which is valid for literature and art in general, that what matters is the way it presents an object of reality, not reality itself. It's like a woman who poses for a painter [but] then demands half the copyright. She owns her body but the work itself belongs to the painter," he said.
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Nobel author Gabriel García Márquez wins 17-year legal fight over murder classic

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On the day they were going to kill him, Cayetano Gentile Chimento got up oblivious to his impending murder. Within hours the dashing Colombian medical student was dead, repeatedly stabbed for allegedly deflowering another man's bride. Few would today remember the 1951 murder, but for the intervention of one of Latin America's best-loved authors.