Word: marquez
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
...format. In adopting the medium of fantasy, an author hopes to convince the reader not with the poignant accuracy of his images and characterizations, as in realistic fiction, but with the subtle, subliminal--but equally poignant--truth underlying the fabrication of plot and character. Kafka, Borges, Lem and Marquez succeed on this secondary level by treading a thin line between fantasy and realism--in The Castle, for example. Kafka's careful use of language preserves this ambiguity: the reader is never quite sure of what to accept as plausible, and what to reject as implausible, so that such a distinction...
Some say Cortazar is moving into a more socially conscious phase--in A Manual he makes a political statement in his preface and includes revolutionary characters--but his main emphasis is still on esthetics. Unlike other South American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Migel Angel Asturias, Cortazar does not concern himself with the social and political ills of his country...
...other stories in the collection were mostly written in the '40s and '50s before Marquez had a name for himself. They are interesting because they show the genesis of what is now a marvelous style, but the myth-making in these early stories is ponderous and inelegant...
...Marquez is not a true philosopher; his stories do not probe deep truths and profound metaphysical concerns. Instead, he is a cataloguer of everyday feelings and attitudes. He realizes, however, that everyday feelings are more complicated than they may seem and are best dealt with by pulling one step away from the commonplace. He has said that the ideal novel should "perturb not only because of its political and social content, but also because of its power of penetrating reality, and better yet, because of its capacity to turn reality upside down so we can see the other side...