SOURCE: Page, Joseph A. “Unmagical Realism.” Commonweal 124, no. 16 (26 September 1997): 20-1.

In the following review, Page criticizes News of a Kidnapping, asserting that “perhaps the most glaring weakness of the book is its failure to put these events in a perspective that would render them more comprehensible to readers unfamiliar with Colombia's tortured history.”

Like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez can sit wherever he pleases, even if this means abandoning the field of Latin American fiction he has dominated since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. So when he decided, as a personal favor to one of the victims, to write a nonfictional account of a series of drug-trafficking-related kidnappings in his native Colombia in 1990, there could be no doubt that his endeavor would find its way into print.

Unfortunately, neither the substantive content nor the literary qualities of News...