Since ["One Hundred Years of Solitude"] and since its successor, "The Autumn of the Patriarch,"… García Márquez has felt doubts about what he is doing. His is the old quandary of the "committed" writer: should he continue to luxuriate in exile, writing books mocking the stagnation and repression of his native continent, or would it not be more honorable to attempt something practical in order to remove them? García Márquez hankers after political activism, to make propaganda for the many as against an exclusive art for the few. But literature needs him. He will do more good for his socialist cause by continuing to write fiction, guilty conscience and all, than by demagogic pamphleteering. He is one of the small number of contemporary writers from Latin America who have given to its literature a maturity and dignity it never had before. That in itself...