Never heard of this guy until I taught some ELS classes. He was the subject of one of the chapters...
I asked my students if they heard of the guy, or knew of his I novels. They all did!
Of course, my students never heard of “Go Ask Alice,” or any of the other literary masterpieces I was forced to read in school.
Magic Realism is a tough nut to crack for me. If anything can happen there’s no tension. I never got through ‘Solitude’.
I was just reading “100 Years of Solitude in Spanish,” when I discovered that it is exactly the same story as “El Sitio de Las Abras,” by Costa Rican, Fabian Dobles, just with a slightly different literary style. Right down to the exploitation by banana companies. Dobles published in 1951 and García Márquez in 1956 (IIRC). Both authors were communists, both with the same axes to grind. IT was disillusioning.