Gabriel García Márquez (born 1928) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose works earned him the reputation of being the greatest living writer of Castilian in Spain and Latin America. Born in Aracata, Magdalena, G...

1928. Born in Aracataca, Colombia. "... Everyone knows that I was born with the umbilical cord tangled around my neck almost strangling me. This was the origin of my terrible claustrophobia."1 "... I happen to come from the Caribbean part of Colombia, wh...

The work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez owes much of its popularity to the seemingly easy access it offers to readers and to the way it departs from the highly intellectualized, self-reflective mode that characterizes other Latin-American fiction of the mid t...

Indonesian Pres Suharto, his family and his cronies have enjoyed tremendous economic prosperity since the late 1960s when Suharto seized the presidency. He has been in power for 32 years and his wealth and that of his cronies has been so enmeshed in Indonesia's...

THE MONSTERS OF ST. HELENA By Brooks Hansen Farrar Straus Giroux. 292 pp. $24 Long ago, when I was just a flighty young thing with wild romantic notions, I kept a list of the famous men, past and present, whom I...

What is supremely interesting [in The Autumn of the Patriarch], and more so than anything in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is García Márquez's modus operandi, which a merely cursory description would have to call a voluptuous, thick, garish, centripetal weaving and re-weaving of quasi-narrative motifs that figure now as emblems, now as salient samples of all the stuff from which the world is made (at least the Caribbean one), now as earnests of a dominant presence who might be the dict...

The Autumn of the Patriarch translates into words an image that haunted Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was the image of an old man wandering aimlessly through the wasting rooms of a palace. It was an image of death and decay. The Patriarch is an ancient dictator whose exact title is General Of The Universe even though his domain is a poor Caribbean country, dependent upon the charity of world powers. His Autumn is the personal decay that preceeds his death. And his death is the focal point with which the novel ...