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. "

WHY DO CELEBRITIES INSIST ON BEING WRITERS TOO???

I'm sure you've all seen those books written by celebrities, I mean, even Obama himself couldn't resist it. What is it about books that lures people into trying to write even when they suck at it? The last fiasco I've read about was Gwyneth Paltrow's cook books.

The reviews speak for themselves...

"... it taks "laughable Hollywood neuroticism about eating to the next level"... It's All Good reads like "the manifesto to some sort of creepy healthy-girl sorority with members who use beet juice rather than permanent marker to circle the 'problem areas' on each other's bodies" ... "Paltrow casually writes that she has a surfeit of apples from teh trees on ther $5.4 million five-bedroom Hamptoms summer home". Her suggested diet, Yahoo! Shine calculates, would cost $300 a day, a figure obviously out of reach for the vast majority of Americans".


Read the whole review here.

And one in Spanish by Mikel López Iturriaga ("el comidista") which is quite fun to read here