SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. “A Nation Held Hostage.” Chicago Tribune Books (10 August 1997): 3, 6.

In the following review of News of a Kidnapping, Levi commends García Márquez's gripping portrayal of a series of abductions carried out in Bogotá in 1990.

A few winters ago, I had lunch in New York with a 25-year-old Colombian man who had spent his previous summer on a farm outside Bogota, blindfolded and tethered to a tree. He had been kidnapped from his family's factory (one of the managers was later implicated) and held for four months until a ransom was paid. I told him the story sounded familiar. “García Márquez,” he said, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I remembered the scene from that remarkable book. The old man, the patriarch of the family, José Arcadio Buendia, goes mad and is tethered, one end of a rope around his waist, the other around...