Reviews
[T]he best homage to a great author is to imagine ways to read his work anew. Gene Bell-Villada's timely selection of essays does exactly that: it sheds new light on a multifaceted writer that still manages to stimulate the critical imagination of readers from around the world. . . . Among its many virtues, this book reminds us that García Márquez embodied a unique pleasure in the act of writing. Most of the collection's papers share this "joie d'ecrire," as they combine rigor, poetry, and a dose of playful wit that suits the analysis of a lyrical mamagallista like Gabo. Among them, Bell-Villada's own good-humored introduction is unparalleled. This tone allows many of the texts to both celebrate the writer and deal with him in an intellectually nuanced way that, instead of solidifying the icy statue of the canonic author, brings a renewed warmth to his work and makes him, once again, our contemporary., This exemplary collection of essays is illuminating, ample, accessible, and ultimately essential for understanding how García Márquez is read today., Gene Bell-Villada's new collection of essays provides much for general readers, students and specialists alike, who are offered an array of critical approaches with which to spar, ranging from the contextual, biographical, literary and literary-historical to the ecocritical, demythifying and on occasion densely theoretical. Particularly welcome is the volume's emphasis on García Márquez's later writing.
Table of Content
Introduction. Garcia Marquez: His Vast Range, His Varied Legacy Gene H. Bell-Villada Part One. Oeuvre, Backgrounds, Legacy 1. Garcia Marquez: Writer for the World Nicholas Birns and Juan De Castro 2. Politics and Death across the Life of Writing Regina Janes 3. Translation and Apprenticeship Edith Grossman 4. Garcia Marquez and mamagallismo: On Fatigued Roosters, Resistance, Sense of Humor, and the Colombian Personality Marcela Velasco Part Two. Re-reading the History of Macondo 5. Names and Narrative Pattern in One Hundred Years of Solitude Gene H. Bell-Villada 6. The Enlightened Blindness of Ursula Iguaran Maria del Mar Lopez-Cabrales 7. Satire, Ecocentrism, and Luddite Discourse in One Hundred Years of Solitude: Regional Approaches for a Global Environmental Crisis William Flores 8. Rediscovering Ice: Garcia Marquez, Aira, and Vallejo on Childhood Memories Hector HoyosPart Three. Later Works 9. After the End: Bolivar in the Labyrinth of History Michael Wood 10. The Magic of Love, the Horrors of Death, and Other Themes in the Short Stories of Garcia Marquez by Ruben Pelayo 11. Gastronomical Pilgrims Fernando Valerio-Holguin 12. Reading Illness in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons Olivia Vazquez-Medina 13. Magical Realism as a Simple Tool to Elicit Humor in Of Love and Other Demons Ignacio Lopez-CalvoPart Four. Other Genres, Other Media 14. The Permutations of the Fictional, Non-Fictional, and Autobiographical 'I' in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Robert L. Sims 15. Doomed from the Start: Big-Screen Adaptations of Two Garcia Marquez Novels Rudyard Alcocer and Haley Osborn 16. Remembering Broadway's Chronicle of a Death Foretold Zhanna Gurvich
