He is without a doubt the most important Spanish-language novelist of the 20th century. Along with Toni Morrison, he was one of the figures whose work pushed magical-realism into the literary mainstream. In 1982, when he was awarded the Novel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work “in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” It was his way of reflecting his vision of a Mexico where “surrealism runs through the streets.”
His most famous novel, 100 Years of Solitude, is unquestionably the greatest of the modern sagas. Love in the Time of Cholera is perhaps the greatest romantic novel ever written. His short stories “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” are required reading for every aspiring author of short fiction. You find traces of his voice across the world, whether it’s in the Spanish-language novels of Isabel Allende or Roberto Bolano, or En tid for alt a Norwegian novel by Karl Ove Knausgard that recounts the study and history of angels.
When he received word that Richard Wagner died the great conductor Hans von Bulow [1] was in the middle of a rehearsal. The story goes that he set down his baton on the music stand and dismissed the orchestra saying “there will be no more music today. A master has died.” This is the debt that is owed to great artists, and it should be said today. There will be no music, a master has died.
[1] Whom Wagner had badly cuckolded. Von Bulow’s wife, Cosima, bore Wagner several children before the dissolution of her marriage to von Bulow.
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