The nonfiction of Gabriel García Márquez

Tony Wood in The Nation:

To begin with, it was the journalism that enabled him to make a precarious living while he wrote fiction, often at night. Yet even after the global success of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, he continued to write articles, commentaries, and reported pieces at an impressive rate. In Spanish, his collected Obra Periodística—not including three book-length works of reportage—spans five volumes, comprising more than 3,000 pages. The Scandal of the Century is the first English-language selection from this vast body of work. Long overdue, it provides a fairly representative slice of García Márquez’s journalistic output. In the first half, we track his movements across the globe, from 1940s Colombia through a string of international assignments in the ’50s and ’60s: Rome, Paris, Budapest, Caracas, and Havana, among many others. In the latter half, we find a more rooted García Márquez, largely through the columns he wrote for El País in the ’80s from Mexico City, where he lived much of the time from the ’70s onward.

More here.