The work of Gabriel García Márquez owes much of its popularity to the seemingly easy access it offers to readers and to the way it departs from the highly intellectualized, self-reflective mode that characterizes other Latin-American fiction of the mid twentieth century by restoring the coherence of plot. An immediate understanding of the facts narrated is possible. The most trivial aspects of such a change in sensibility may be understood in terms of the attraction for readers to form conventional projections into characters and actions; the less obvious reasons behind the appeal of García Márquez's fiction reveal a different kind of lucidity at work, a new sense of how literature may better reflect on its own making.

García Márquez has authored many short stories and several novels, as well as journalistic articles that, since 1948, have appeared...