THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY

An eye-opening collection of articles that reveal Gabo the
journalist.

New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson
sets up this eclectic and transportive selection of 50 journalistic pieces from
1950 to 1984 by the Colombian Nobel laureate, noting in his introduction that
journalism was García Márquez’s “first true love.” In fact, the beloved
novelist (1927-2014) called it the “best profession in the world.” Editor Pera
confesses that he purposefully chose pieces that “contain a latent narrative
tension between journalism and literature” to showcase the author’s
“unstoppable narrative impulse.” The titular article, the longest in the
collection, written for El Spectador, which published García
Márquez’s first short stories, is an account of the mysterious death of a young
Italian woman in Rome in 1953. The atmospheric, serialized piece is told in
chapter form and might owe something to García Márquez’s love of two “perfect”
short stories he references in “Like Souls in Purgatory”: W.W. Jacobs’ “The
Monkey’s Paw” and Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Many of the
articles confront political and social issues, including the U.S. blockade of
Cuba, the Sandinista raid in Managua, Nicaragua, the international trafficking
of women, the death of his beloved Magdalena River from pollution and
deforestation, and the Soviet intervention in Hungary. In “Misadventures of a
Writer of Books,” García Márquez admits that a writer “has no other
revolutionary obligation than to write well.” He rages about bad teachers of
literature who “spout nonsense,” calls the Nobel Prize a “senile laurel,” is
convinced “Japanese novels have something in common with mine,” praises
“self-sacrificing” translators as “brilliant accomplice[s],” and mourns the
death of John Lennon. In the lovely “My Personal Hemingway,” García Márquez
recalls seeing him across a Paris street in 1957 and shouting out,
“Maaeeestro!”