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Chronicles of a Death Foretold |
In just 122 pages Marquez brings to life a small Colombian community in which everyone is complicit to a murder which is about to happen including the victim. They all know but no one does anything, all of them waiting for someone else to do something. 27 years later a man returns to try and piece together what happened and why. Read it once, straight through, then read it again. Was it really a honour killing? Are you sure?
(Jenny Baker - bwl 94 Autumn 2019) |
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Living to Tell the Tale |
The first (and long) volume of the Colombian writer's memoirs. I found it fascinating to learn how the author drew on people, episodes and the settings of his childhood and youth when writing his two great novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (bwl 41) and Love in the Time of Cholera (bwl 20). His memoirs give a vivid description how life was for the relatively poor in Colombia's tropical regions in the second half of the last century.
*Winner 1982 Nobel Prize Literature
(Jeremy Swann - bwl 58 Autumn 2010) |
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Love in the Time of Cholera |
This brilliant novel overthrows the idea that love is the prerogative of the young. It begins with the death of Juvenal Urbino who falls from a mango tree trying to rescue a parrot. This is the cue for the reawakening of a love affaire between his widow and the suitor she rejected fifty-one years, nine months and four days earlier. Rich in imagery, filled with preposterous but believable characters it makes the heart sing!
(Jenny Baker - bwl 20 September 2003) |
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News of a Kidnapping |
Quite apart from the vivid description of the sufferings of a number of Colombian notables kidnapped in 1990 by the henchmen of drugs baron Pablo Escobar, this reconstruction by the 1982 Nobel Literature prize-winner paints a horrendous picture of violence and anarchy in a country where law and order had broken down.
(Jeremy Swann - bwl 8 April 2001) |
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One Hundred Years of Solitude |
Although this author's superb Love in the Time of Cholera was reviewed in bookswelike (bwl 20), I was surprised to find that his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude had not been reviewed before. This stimulating fantasy, featuring life in the imagined jungle settlement of Macondo in Colombia, set Garcia Marquez's feet firmly on the path towards his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. I strongly recommend this remarkable feat of creativity.
(Jeremy Swann - bwl 41 August 2007) |
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