When the trumpet sounded
everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah gave the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations.
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
piece, the central coast of my world,
the delicate waist of America...

From my Facebook news feed: incoming Attorney General Eric Holder's relationship with Chiquita. I usually outsource my commentary on Chiquita to Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, but suffice it to say, generally speaking, this is perhaps my least favorite corporate conglomerate. It's really, really unfortunate that Holder was involved with them, though I must admit that his actions as their counsel in this particular instance don't strike me as especially reprehensible in context. Glen Greenwald for the defense:

I've seen some attempts to criticize Holder based upon clients he has represented while in private practice, most notably his defense of Chiquita Brands in a criminal case brought by the DOJ arising out of Chiquita's payments and other support to Colombian death squads. Attempts to criticize a lawyer for representing unsavory or even evil clients are inherently illegitimate and wrong -- period. Anybody who believes in core liberties should want even the most culpable parties to have zealous representation before the Government can impose punishments or other sanctions. Lawyers who defend even the worst parties are performing a vital service for our justice system. Holder is no more tainted by his defense of Chiquita than lawyers who defend accused terrorists at Guantanamo are tainted by that.

This week's image and tag is intended as a little bit of a provocation, as I've just reread One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time this decade and I'm hard-pressed to disagree with William Kennedy's infamous pronouncement that the book is "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race" (except, of course, insofar as I don't believe that's even true of Genesis). I'm honestly hard-pressed to think of books with matching claims on the vaunted title of "greatest work of literature ever" (which is funny, because it's been so long since I'd last read it that I accidentally and shamefully left it off my list of the definitive books of the 20th century back in June).

So, who are the serious challengers? Ulysses? Don Quixote? Karamazov? Homer? The Bhagavad Gita? Arabian Nights? The Book of Psalms? I think García Márquez takes all comers.



Here's the Nobel Prize lecture from which the tag is taken, an optimistic reworking of the novel's wonderfully apocalyptic final sentence. If there's one thing I'm learning from studying all these Nobel Prize winners this semester, it's that you've got to turn your optimism all the way up to 11 in Stockholm, no matter how depressing your novels actually are.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ilan Stavans celebrates the fortieth anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude, so plainly one of the finest novels ever written as to go without saying.

Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela today is watched by far more people than all the readers of García Márquez's novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. But like the firefly, the soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience's passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable. True, when read closely, as I've been doing this semester with my students, it's clearly first and foremost a melodrama, albeit a magisterial one, with syrupy scenes of unrequited love, sibling animosity, and domestic back stabbing.

But the signature mix of exoticism, magic, and the grotesque that García Márquez employs doesn't come from the world of soap operas. Known as "magical realism" — a category loosely connected to what the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier called "lo real maravilloso" — the term has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless. For a while it denoted an attempt to erase the border between fact and fiction, between the natural and the supernatural. But its current use is chaotic. It helps in cataloging García Márquez's second-rate successors, like Isabel Allende, as it does in understanding Salman Rushdie's baroque hodgepodge of dreams and nationalism in Midnight's Children and Toni Morrison's phantasmagoric meditation on slavery in Beloved. All have been linked to "magical realism," with various degrees of success.

García Márquez, however, is its acknowledged fountainhead, and for good reason...