Gabriel García Márquez: NOTAS DE PRENSA

Every reader must have a favorite story about an encounter with the books of the Colombian writer who died yesterday. Mine is not with A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLUTIDE or LOVE IN A TIME OF CHOLERA — though I loved them both — but with a collection of his newspaper columns NOTAS DE PRENSA. For many years García Márquez made his living as a journalist, and NOTAS is a collection of his reportage of political and social life in his native country. I remember a wonderful column about a visit paid him by the then Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in which García Márquez wryly explained that what readers and critics thought of as magical realism was nothing more than his appropriation of everyday life on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. His conceit was that magical realism was a variant of realism — and who's to say he isn't right?