This title presents in-depth critical discussions of his life and works. Volume editor Ilan Stavans accurately point out that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, ‘is credited for almost single-handedly reinventing Latin America’. Garcia Marquez, a trained journalist, made his indelible mark on literature with the 1967 publication of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
which heralded what was later dubbed
El Boom , the Latin American literary movement that came to define Latin American literature. Edited and introduced by Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College-Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College, this volume collects varying perspectives on Garcia Marquez, his work and its lasting importance. Stavans’ introduction places Garcia Marquez squarely in the Latin American literary culture noting that ‘the majority of people in Latin America approach Garcia Marquez with utter reverence’. Stavans’ introduction is followed by a brief biography after which Caitlin Roper, the managing editor of
The Paris Review , draws on
The Paris Review
interview with Garcia Marquez in highlighting some of the writer’s achievements. The critical contexts section of this volume features original essays by Amy Sickels, Amy Green, and John Cussen as well as a contribution from volume editor Stavans. Sickels offers a timeline of Garcia Marquez’s achievements and considers his influence on a younger generation of writers. Stavans’ contribution combines biographical information with a broad overview of how
One Hundred Years
was received by the literary world-placing that volume at the center of Garcia Marquez’s body of work. Amy Green also considers
One Hundred Years , with her focus being the mystical character of Remedios. John Cussen finishes this section with a comparison between Garcia Marquez’s travelogue
90 dias
and
Don Quixote de La Mancha . The section of republished essays brings together a variety of perspectives on Garcia Marquez’s major works. Seasoned Garcia Marquez scholar Gene H. Bell-Villada considers Garcia Marquez’s shorter works after which Moylan C. Mills and Enrique Gronlund offer a brief history of how the concept of Magical Realism evolved. Deborah Cohn places the influence of William Faulkner on Garcia Marquez alongside those of James Joyce and Virginia Wolf. Cohn’s essay is followed by Rosa Simas’ examination of patterns of time in One Hundred Years of Solitude through various perspectives. Brian Conniff concentrates his attention in Jose Arcadio Buendia and One Hundred Years while Stephen M. Hart shifts the attention to
Chronicle of a Death Foretold . Michael Palencia-Roth, another scholar well-versed in Garcia Marquez’s works, considers intertextuality in The Autumn of the Patriarch while Lourdes Elena Morales-Gudmundsson concentrates on the concepts of justice and human rights expounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition as adapted into the novella
No One Writes to the Colonel
and
The Autumn of the Patriarch . M. Keith Booker argues for a deeper reading of
Love in the Time of Cholera
and compares the novel to Madame Bovary and Lolita. In the volume’s concluding essay, Efrain Kristal suggests that Garcia Marquez, like many memoirists, sanitizes his past and ultimately comes to the conclusion that Garcia Marquez remains difficult to pin down. Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ‘Works Cited’, along with endnotes. Finally, the volume’s appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources.