Drop everything and read One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, now. See other entries in this series here.

Gabriel García Márquez does not blend fantasy and reality into one surreal realm.  Mr.Márquez creates instead an environment where each sphere vies for dominance.  The reader might forget whether the novel takes place on the Earth the reader understands viscerally until he or she stumbles upon one ethereal scene that impresses upon the reader the book’s dual nature before it dissolves and allows reality to resume.  However, I defy the reader to confess that he or she did not feel Mr. Márquez’s universe as the reader feels his or her flesh.

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant.  He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places.

This narrative manifests for the reader physical and emotional impressions as deeply as a rifle’s butt dully collapsing a soldier’s skull.  It is not whimsy that makes so powerful the author’s writing.  It is intent.  To doubt that Mr. Márquez did not want to thrust a people’s reality into the reader’s side is to miss his motivation. …
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