SOURCE: Lane, Charles. “The Writer in His Labyrinth.” New Republic 217, no. 8 (25 August 1997): 30-8.

In the following positive review of News of a Kidnapping, Lane provides biographical background on García Márquez, his ideological development, and the political situation in Colombia.

I.

The Falklands War produced its share of sensational stories, but none was more sensational than the one published by Gabriel García Márquez in the Madrid newspaper El País on April 6, 1983, a year after the war ended. It was an account, based on a purported “letter” from an unnamed “witness,” of gruesome atrocities perpetrated by the British Army's Nepalese auxiliaries, the Gurkhas, García Márquez, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before, wrote that the “legendary and ferocious Nepalese decapitators,” wielding “assassins' scimitars,” beheaded one Argentine prisoner “every seven seconds.” And “because of some strange custom they held up...