SALMAN RUSHDIE on García Márquez

I did not want to make the previous entry too long, but this is a really good essay by Rushdie paying homage to Gabriel García Márquez, "Gabo". I love the parallelism he establishes with Faulkner too.

"The trouble with the term “magic realism,” el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.” But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works. "

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A Life in Pictures

The Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who has died aged 87, helped to ignite the worldwide boom in Spanish literature with novels such as 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Here The Guardian celebrates his life with a selection of images charting his journey from childhood in northern Colombia to global literary titan.

And an interview with Isabel Allende where she remembers the life and legacy of late writer Gabriel García Márquez. She reads from his landmark novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and talks about how García Márquez influenced generations of thinkers and writers in Latin America and across the world. "He’s the master of masters," Allende says. "In a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world, and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror." Allende describes the first time she read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and how it impacted her. "It was as if someone was telling me my own story," she says. We also air video of García Márquez in his own words and hear Democracy Now! co-host Juan González read from "The General in His Labyrinth."