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Six years had passed between the publication of The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold . The new book, brief as it was, sold in its millions around the world and convinced the critics that Garcia Marquez was back with a vengeance and capable, literarily speaking, of almost anything. In December 1982 the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Colombian was probably the most popular decision made by the Swedish Academy in the second half of the twentieth century. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he pleaded for greater sympathy for the Latin American continent from which he came and which, by now, he felt entitled to represent. He spoke of a region still unknown and neglected, a region which was indeed magical but not in an irrational way, a region consistently subjected to the travesty of being judged by the standards of Europe in terms of culture and politics when Europe, which had many unhappy ghosts walking its corridors and skeletons rattling its closets, had taken a thousand years to achieve what it expected Latin America to have achieved in two hundred. ‘Allow us to live out our own Middle Ages,’ he declared, ‘so that our peoples, despite all their misfortunes, may have a second chance upon the earth’.

How does a child born in a small tropical town grow up to become a great writer? As a small boy Gabriel Garcia Marquez drew accomplished pictures well before he could read and write, and his early experience in a Montessori school may have helped him acquire the remarkable sensuality and plasticity so evident in his literary art. The first work he remembered reading was the One Thousand and One Nights , in which Scheherazade manages to survive by enchanting the murderous caliph with the hypnotic beauty of her storytelling – an appropriate antecedent, perhaps, for any Latin American child wishing to be a writer in that most politically risky of continents. Later, adding to the exotic impact of that magical serial, he read such typical boyish adventure stories as The Count of Monte Cristo , Treasure Island and the tales of Salgari, novels written by masters of narrative, the sort of books which some writers forswear as they become more sophisticated but which for him remained eternal classics of the storyteller’s art. In high school in Zipaquira , as a romantic adolescent, he turned to poetry. Few countries in Latin America were traditionally more committed to poetry, as against the novel, than Colombia. (Chile and Nicaragua would be two further examples.) In the 1940s, when Garcia Marquez was a student, Colombian poetry boasted a movement called Piedra y Cielo (Stone and Sky), ef ectively a national continuation of the avant-garde movements in Spain and Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, whose most notable representatives were Spain’s Federico Garcia Lorca and Chile’s Pablo Neruda – though all the poets of their generation owed a vast debt to the end-of-the-century Nicaraguan modernist Ruben Dario , whom Garcia Marquez himself would always revere.