escribing the impossibility of inventing a dictator whose cruel quirks could outdo twentieth-century precedent, Gabriel García Márquez simply shrugged: “Latin American and Caribbean writers have to admit, hands on hearts, that reality is a better writer than we are.” In that same 1981 column for the Spanish newspaper El País, he also framed the aesthetic of magical realism for which he is so famous as an accommodation to literary tastes trained on Europe, unprepared for the “disproportionate reality” of Latin America. Someone who thinks the Danube is long cannot imagine the enormity of the Amazon, he figured, and someone who thinks a “storm” means rain and thunder cannot imagine the full force of a hurricane. Literature is not for augmenting reality, then, but imitating it—which occasionally requires exaggeration.
