The death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez prompted a euphoric celebration
of the man who made magic realism a reality. His magnum opus 100 Years of
Solitude shattered the decades-old tradition that kept Latin American novelists
confined to hyper-local expressions of their country’s cultural identity
written for the psyche of their own compatriots. The saga of the fictional town
of Macondo used universal themes of love, isolation and despair to give the
rest of the world a window into a region whose literature had until then been
intensely navel-gazing.
