CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
Apr. 18th, 2014 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogSeeing as how I have a lot of his books on my shelf, I should probably say something about Gabriel García Márquez, who is gone now. Which isn’t a huge shock – his health had been deteriorating enough that it was making news a couple of years ago.
I’ll be the first to admit that I only started reading him for two reasons:
1. Jello Biafra namedropped him on a spoken-word album as an example of foreign artists who were banned by the US Govt from entering the country. In the case of García Márquez, it was because he was critical of US foreign policy in Latin America. I figured anyone the US Govt didn’t want me exposed to was worth checking out.
2. I didn’t come across any of his work until I found some short-story collections for dirt-cheap at a wholesale warehouse bookstore whilst on vacation in Panama City in the early 90s: Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
The impact was pretty immediate. Apart from learning about life and culture in his part of the world, I liked the way he infused his stories with dry humor and just enough strangeness and the supernatural to set them apart from typical slice-of-life literature. I’ve been a fan ever since. Even his non-fiction was good reading, though I confess I’ve only read News Of A Kidnapping.
I haven’t read everything by him, if only because some of his books aren’t easy to find. You can pretty much always find One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera (mainly because of the film version), but beyond that it’s sketchy, and odds are I’ll have already read it.
Maybe that will change once the book publishers start reprinting post-mortem editions of his books. I hope so. I’d like to read more.
Anyway, respect.
ADDENDUM: Strangely, my love of García Márquez’s works hasn’t led to exploring other Latin American writers. I’ve been told if I like García Márquez, I’ll also dig Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Lhosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño and Jose Saramago (though the latter is from Portugal, not Central/South America). But so far I haven't got around to it. I expect I will one day.
Strange pilgrims,
This is dF
I’ll be the first to admit that I only started reading him for two reasons:
1. Jello Biafra namedropped him on a spoken-word album as an example of foreign artists who were banned by the US Govt from entering the country. In the case of García Márquez, it was because he was critical of US foreign policy in Latin America. I figured anyone the US Govt didn’t want me exposed to was worth checking out.
2. I didn’t come across any of his work until I found some short-story collections for dirt-cheap at a wholesale warehouse bookstore whilst on vacation in Panama City in the early 90s: Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
The impact was pretty immediate. Apart from learning about life and culture in his part of the world, I liked the way he infused his stories with dry humor and just enough strangeness and the supernatural to set them apart from typical slice-of-life literature. I’ve been a fan ever since. Even his non-fiction was good reading, though I confess I’ve only read News Of A Kidnapping.
I haven’t read everything by him, if only because some of his books aren’t easy to find. You can pretty much always find One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera (mainly because of the film version), but beyond that it’s sketchy, and odds are I’ll have already read it.
Maybe that will change once the book publishers start reprinting post-mortem editions of his books. I hope so. I’d like to read more.
Anyway, respect.
ADDENDUM: Strangely, my love of García Márquez’s works hasn’t led to exploring other Latin American writers. I’ve been told if I like García Márquez, I’ll also dig Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Lhosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño and Jose Saramago (though the latter is from Portugal, not Central/South America). But so far I haven't got around to it. I expect I will one day.
Strange pilgrims,
This is dF
