SOURCE: Carvalho, Susan de. “Origins of Social Pessimism in García Márquez: ‘The Night of the Curlews.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 3 (summer 1991): 331-38.

In the following essay, de Carvalho argues that the short story “The Night of the Curlews” is a turning point in García Márquez's literary development.

At the end of 1949, the Colombian journalist Alfonso Fuenmayor said of his friend García Márquez: “Gabito parece ser el gran cuentista que con tanto paciencia y con tanto escepticismo ha venido esperando el país” [“Gabito appears to be the great storyteller that the country has been waiting for with such patience and such skepticism”].¹ By that date, the young author had published only five short stories,² toward which later critics have shared little of Fuenmayor's enthusiasm. These early stories were not seriously studied until after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude...