No One Writes to the Colonel may seem unassuming, for the story line is simple and non-experimental in technique. However, its narrative exposes a corrupt town and its institutions. No One Writes to the Colonel, to date, continues to be… Read More ›
Magical Realism
Analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s Leaf Storm
Garcıa Márquez’s (1927-2014) first novella, Leaf Storm, was translated into English in 1972, eighteen years after it was published in Spanish and two years after the English-speaking public first read his acclaimed masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. As might… Read More ›
Analysis of Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The publication of Chronicle of a Death Foretold broke Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s (1927-2014) self-imposed “publication strike.” (He had pledged to not publish anything for as long as Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet remained in power.) Garcıa Marquez’s period of silence started… Read More ›
Analysis of Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera
Carlos R. Rodr ́ıguez, a friend of Garcıa Marquez (1927-2014) and well-known literary critic, wrote that if One Hundred Years of Solitude had not secured the road to Stockholm for Garcıa Marquez to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, Love in… Read More ›
Analysis of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s (1927-2014) One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published on May 30, 1967, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The cover of the first edition, which was never repeated, depicted the silhouette of a galleon floating amid trees against a… Read More ›
Analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s Stories
Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927 – 2014) fiction is characterized by a thread of common themes, events, and characters that seem to link his work together into one multifaceted portrayal of the experiences of Latin American life. From the influences of his… Read More ›
Analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’s Stories
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) may be, quite simply, the single most important writer of short fiction in the history of Latino literature. The stories he published in his collections Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, particularly the former, not… Read More ›
Analysis of Günter Grass’s Novels
Although Günter Grass’s (1927 – 2015) novel The Tin Drum forms the first part of the Danzig Trilogy and shares some characters, events, and themes with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, the novel was conceived independently and can be discussed… Read More ›
Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Novels
Many Western readers, ignorant of Islam and Hinduism, the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, and the Pakistani civil war of 1974, may tend to read Salman Rushdie’s (born 19… Read More ›
Analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s Novels
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) denies that the fictional world he describes in his novels is a world of fantasy. In an article about fantasy and artistic creation in Latin America, he concludes: “Reality is a better writer than… Read More ›
Historical Representations in Indian English Novels
When white light hits glass one of two things can happen. Either you have an image, which is faithful if somewhat unexciting, or you have a glorious spectrum which though beautiful is rather a distortion. Light from the past passes… Read More ›
Postcolonial Magical Realism
The majority of magical realist writing can be described as postcolonial. That is to say much of it is set in a postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective that challenges the assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude. As… Read More ›