RIP GGM

Aged 87, so hardly shocking, and I remember a foretelling of his imminent death about a decade ago, allegedly from the pen of the man himself. Though it was either fake, or he got better, as he carried on living and writing for years afterwards.

 As for the books themselves, I was flabbergasted the first time I read A Hundred Years of Solitude, but on re-reading it seemed flat, contrived and really just an endless recitation of random stuff happening.

Great ending though. I read lots of his books, and they all seemed pretty much the same, South American melancholia-by-numbers and lots of random stuff happening that was presumably meant to be portentous.

 I think the thing that annoyed me about 100 Years was the slab like pages of text, without dialogue or even paragraphs. Just endless recitation of what was going on, none of which really amounted to much. There were only a handful of key incidents in the book and the rest of it was just filling pages to give it an epic feel so it really did seem like a century had passed.

That said, the last time I re-read it, the fate of the luckless Mauricio Babilonia (yeah, I had to look up his name), a minor character I'd pretty much over looked before, struck me as incredibly sad. Fantastic apocalyptic ending. I've never been able to look at ants quite the same way since.

And still one of the iconic writers, for all my carping.

 And it is a shame he didn't get to live to a hundred, for obvious reasons.

Interesting

Rafael Escalona, singer/composer: born Patillal, Colombia 27 May 1927; died Bogotá, Colombia 13 May 2009.

The singer and composer Rafael Escalona was a national icon in his native Colombia, known as "el maestro" of vallenato folk music from the northern Caribbean coast. His ballads, sung to the traditional backing of European accordion, African-style caja, or bongo drum, and Native Indian bamboo guacharaca percussion, inspired many internationally known Latino singers, including Julio Iglesias, Gloria Estefan and his fellow Colombians Shakira and Carlos Vives. Escalona also made a lasting impression on another compatriot (and close friend), Gabriel García Márquez. The author mentioned Escalona as a resident of the fictional town of Macondo in his Nobel Prize-winning novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and said that Escalona, and his music, had been an inspiration for the book.

"In a way, the novel is a 400-page vallenato," García Márquez once said, comparing Escalona's blend of true story and the fantastical with his own "magical realism". Towards the end of the book, García Márquez wrote: "In the last open saloon... an accordion group was playing the songs of Rafael Escalona, the bishop's nephew, heir to the secrets of Francisco el Hombre." The latter figure (Francisco the Man), a legend in vallenato music, was said to have been a musician who beat the devil in a duel of accordions.

(Read full obituary)

Only saw this in the Independent today, coincidentally it is Escalona's birthday.