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<\/p>

Algis Valiunas <\/a> has little affection for Gabriel Garcia Marquez <\/a> , the Columbian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/i> <\/a> , inventor of \u201cmagical realism,\u201d and one of the most widely read and best-loved living writers. In a brief review of the first volume of Marquez\u2019s memoirs, Valiunas summarizes some of the smarmier incidents of Marquez\u2019s own life (drink, drugs, affairs, brothels), all of which is recounted in the memoirs with an unrepentant macho swagger. Nor does Valiunas think much of Marquez the writer. At the root of everything in Marquez, he says, is an \u201celemental collision between Life and Death,\u201d and there is a continuous message that \u201cone must be determined to live ?Eabove all, to love ?Ewith fearless devotion to the very end, or else consign oneself to the ash-pits for those who have given up living before they are actually dead.\u201d In Love in the Time of Cholera <\/i> <\/a> , this thematic clash is worked out with sufficient \u201chopefulness as to make one\u2019s misgivings seem rather small,\u201d but Valiunas has not even so tepid a commendation for Marquez\u2019s supposed masterpiece, which he characterizes as follows: \u201cfew works of man enjoy such vast renown and deserve it so little.\u201d Far from being, as it and its fans claim, an exploration of the richness of life, One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/i> <\/a> is \u201cthe most smotheringly bookish of books,\u201d one whose opinions and ideas are drawn from earlier writers without \u201cvital and convincing action\u201d to give them fresh life. It is always invigorating to see a critic buck such a massive critical consensus. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"