Marquez Downs Pen

Although it was rumoured last year that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was working on a new novel, his agent announced this week that she thinks the 82 year old master of magical realism has put down his pen for good.

Now 82, Marquez's last book Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, which attracted very mixed reviews, was published five years ago. Marquez in fact told fans last year that he was worn out by writing.
Mark Lawson on The Guardian blog reckons that great writers usually knock off work well before the ends of their lives as a way to control quality, but notes that fans and publishers find it hard to let go.

Postscript :

Did Agatha Christie suffer from Alzheimer's towards the end of her life? Academics at Toronto University have found :

... statistically significant drops in vocabulary, and increases in repeated phrases and indefinite nouns in 15 detective novels from The Mysterious Affair at Styles to Postern of Fate ... These language effects are recognised as symptoms of memory difficulties associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Thanks, Chet, for this link!

Incidentally, here's the original article in PDF and the analysing tool is here so you can try it yourself!

Nother Postscript :

Or have we just been too premature? Literary Saloon raps all our knuckles for spreading ill-founded gossip. Note to self - resist being sensationalist when the newspapers go down that route. We bloggers should be the real professionals!

More at The Guardian.

Question : what kind of agent doesn't know whether her star author is writing or not?

Bolaño Wins Book Critic's Circle Award

On Thursday the US Book Critics Circle announced the winners of its awards in several categories for books published last year.

The fiction prize was taken by Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 :

... a tale of love and violence set within the framework of the fictional town of Santa Teresa, Mexico, that’s widely regarded as the late author’s masterpiece...

The book was described by fiction committee chair Marcela Valdes as :

... a virtuoso accomplishment that ranks with Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian as one of the trenchant and kaleidoscopic examinations of evil in fiction.

Tim Martin in The Telegraph profiles one of the :

... most important and adventurous authors of our time.

Bolaño died in 2003.

Bali Photos (2)

Remember Camilla Gibb who was in KL last year for the literary festival? Well her novel Sweetness in the Belly which many of you have enjoyed has now been translated into Bahasa Indonesia with the title Lilly : Pencarian Cinta Seorang Gadis Eropa di Etiopia. Wouldn't it be nice to have a Bahasa Malaysia version for the local market??

Pakistani author Moni Mohsin now lives in London, and her debut novel The End of Innocence was published in 2006. Really enjoyed talking to her at the dinner at Karim Razlan's house.

The last session on the last day was defintely one of the best. Deepika Shetty was in conversation with Mexican master of magical realism Alberto Ruy Sanchez. It is impossible to listen to him and not fall in love.

Guess what? Bernice discovered that he will be stopping over in KL next week and plans to get him to do a reading. (More news about this later when it's fixed up.)

And here's our Bernice between sessions.

Bringing Magic to Macondo

Perhaps the bookish biggest news story of the last few days was the story of Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez' return to the town of Aracataca which he immortalised as Macondo in his classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book has sold 30m copies worldwide.

Marquez spent the first eight years of his life in the town, living with his grandparents. Writes Juan Forero in the Washington Post:

It was here that a young García Márquez heard ghost stories, fairy tales and one adventure yarn after another, drawn from the region's rich and often blood-soaked history. The inspiration led him to become one of the leading writers in the style known as magical realism, with its penchant for weaving sharply drawn realism with dreamlike, even preposterous twists, all presented in a deadpan tone.

Marquez arrived in style on the Macondo Express decorated with yellow butterflies that have come to symbolise Macondo and a train-load of musicians, singers, friends and family - and even a government minister. Forero describes the scene:

Thousands of people had lined the route, screaming "Gabo, Gabo, Gabo" and holding up giant posters featuring the irreverent author's smiling face framed by enormous glasses. They threw confetti, set off fireworks and let loose yellow balloons. Brass bands played and pint-size schoolgirls performed, dressed as butterflies.

Marquez' triumphant return marks the launch of a new passenger service which it is hoped with bring much needed tourism to the area. A holiday with a little magical realism sprinkled in, anyone?

(Pics nicked from Guardian (top) and the Age (bottom))

Thirty Years of Authors' Feud

It's sad when a close friendship degenerates into enemity, deeply unfortunate when it ends in fisticuffs.

Gabrial Garcia Marquez's close friendship with Mario Vargas Llosa ended in a punchup in a Mexican cinema in 1976. The reasons for the fight have never been revealed, and the two have not spoken since. (Marquez is apparently not prepared to write the second volume of his memoirs because he does not want to have to reveal the cause of the feud.)

Now after thirty years, it seems that relationship between the two giants of Latin American literature has thawed a little, the Guardian reports. A special edition of García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, is to be published by the Spanish Language Academy, marking this year's 40th anniversary of the book's publication. It is to include a prologue by Vargas Llosa which is an excerpt from his book about García Marquez History of a Deicide (1971)

Guy Dammann on the Guardian blog ponders this and other favourite literary feuds, but reckons:

... pens unsheathed in enmity write with more wit and interest than do the nibs of praise - nobody now reads the panegyrics of eighteenth-century English literature, but everyone reads Pope and Swift - and I'd prefer any literary feud to the soppy, self-serving associations that most great writers have in place of friendship.

He asks which literary feuds would you like to see ended? (And more wickedly, begun?)

We certainly don't have writers' feuds here in Malaysia ... or do we?

Postscript:

Want more? A reader on the Guardian blog points to this essay on the subject in the New York Times.

(Picture nicked from the Guardian shows Marquez (left) and Vargas Llosa (right))