No note of the death of this celebrated Nobel prize-winner - which presumably means no one here has read much to influence them personally? I imagine he ranks with Borges as one of the internationally-recognised 20th-c. S.American writers, and along with Lorca to make a trio writing in Spanish? I ventured to buy one of his novellas (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) - I thought I might manage to get through a short work in Spanish! But clearly I haven't touched on the great works like One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Perhaps it's not valid to link him with Borges, who perhaps is so popular outside the Spanish-speaking world for being largely apolitical?
Perhaps it's not valid to link him with Borges, who perhaps is so popular outside the Spanish-speaking world for being largely apolitical?
I read several of the shorter ones in the original. Crónica de una muerte anunciada is a straightforward tale with an air of Lorca-esque doom about it, La aventura de Miguel Littin clandestino en Chile the true story of a Chilean film-maker, who was under a ban from re-entering his homeland by the Pinochet government, making an undercover film under extremely dangerous circumstances. Another factual book is Noticias de un secuestro about a celebrated kidnapping by a Colombian drugs cartel. I've read some of the other shorter ones - La mala hora, El coronel... and La hojarasca (Fallen leaves) with varying degrees of ease. The vocab can be tricky, at least in his fiction - Vargas Llosa (whose book on Roger Casement, El sueño del celta, I reviewed on the What are you reading... thread) I find more straightforward. I don't altogether "get" magic realism, and need to read some criticism....time to have another go, I think.
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