Hardback: Gabriel García Márquez's book begins in November 1990 in Bogotá, Colombia, when a group of gunmen ambush a car and kidnap its two women passengers. The gunmen were working for Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellin cocaine cartel, who in the early nineties kidnapped the relatives of a number of Colombian politicians in order to pressurise the government to suspend the policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the USA.
New of a Kidnapping (1997) is at once an angry, disturbing account of how Escobar undermined all Colombia's civil institutions by murder or bribery, and a moving exploration of the fate of Escobar's hostages, who were mostly middle-aged or elderly women. Márquez has talked to the survivors, read their diaries and reconstructed their ordeal in a way that only a great novelist could do.
As John Butt said in the
Times Literary Supplement, the book is 'a non-fictional record of real events but one so transformed by a brilliant story-teller that it must be called a novel...'
'The novel's central image is of a few middle-aged or elderly women, lying day after day on filthy mattresses on the floor in a fetid, smoke-filled room a few feet square, with two or three hooded louts with machine-guns squatting in the corner watching their every move, alternately taunting, threatening, sulking, reassuring, apologizing.
The thugs seem torn between a desire to reduce their captives to insanity and a fear that they might turn hysterical. The courage and dignity of the victims is worthy only of a story-teller of the stature of García Márquez, who has the gift of transforming journalism into art, thanks to his uniquely infallible eye for the dramatically necessary detail.
The publication of this novel in English will be a major event and will surely transform the outside world's awareness of how a country has been destroyed by insane greed and excessive personal wealth. It should also remind us that if we do not take note, the fate of Colombia could be the future of millions of others.' - John Butt,
Times Literary Supplement, reviewing the Spanish edition.
News of a Kidnapping was translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.
About the author: Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was a Colombian novelist, reporter, foreign correspondent and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mostly for his masterpiece
Cien años de soledad (1967;
One Hundred Years of Solitude). He was the fourth Latin American to be so honoured, having been preceded by Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971 and by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967. With Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez is the best-known Latin American writer in history. In addition to his masterly approach to the novel, he was a superb crafter of short stories and an accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.
Before 1967 García Márquez had published two novels,
La hojarasca (1955;
The Leaf Storm) and
La mala hora (1962;
In Evil Hour); a novella,
El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961;
No One Writes to the Colonel); and a few short stories. Then came
One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which García Márquez tells the story of Macondo, an isolated town whose history is like the history of Latin America on a reduced scale. While the setting is realistic, there are fantastic episodes, a combination that has come to be known as “magic realism,” wrongly thought to be the peculiar feature of all Latin American literature. Mixing historical facts and stories with instances of the fantastic is a practice that García Márquez derived from Cuban master Alejo Carpentier, considered to be one of the founders of magic realism. The inhabitants of Macondo are driven by elemental passions—lust, greed, thirst for power - which are thwarted by crude societal, political, or natural forces, as in Greek tragedy and myth.
Continuing his magisterial output, García Márquez issued
El otoño del patriarca (1975;
The Autumn of the Patriarch), Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981;
Chronicle of a Death Foretold), El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985;
Love in the Time of Cholera; filmed 2007),
El general en su laberinto (1989;
The General in His Labyrinth), and
Del amor y otros demonios (1994;
Of Love and Other Demons). The best among those books are
Love in the Time of Cholera, about a touching love affair that takes decades to be consummated, and
The General in His Labyrinth, a chronicle of Simón Bolívar’s last days. In 1996 García Márquez published a journalistic chronicle of drug-related kidnappings in his native Colombia,
Noticia de un secuestro (
News of a Kidnapping).
After being diagnosed with cancer in 1999, García Márquez wrote the memoir
Vivir para contarla (2002;
Living to Tell the Tale), which focuses on his first 30 years. He returned to fiction with
Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004;
Memories of My Melancholy Whores), a novel about a lonely man who finally discovers the meaning of love when he hires a virginal prostitute to celebrate his 90th birthday.
García Márquez was known for his capacity to create vast, minutely woven plots and brief, tightly knit narratives in the fashion of his two North American models, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. The easy flow of even the most intricate of his stories has been compared to that of Miguel de Cervantes, as have his irony and overall humour. García Márquez’s novelistic world is mostly that of provincial Colombia, where medieval and modern practices and beliefs clash both comically and tragically. (biography compiled by Roberto González Echevarría for
Encyclopaedia Britannica)
