SOURCE: Reid, Alastair. “Report from an Undeclared War.” New York Review of Books 44, no. 15 (9 October 1997): 19-22.

In the following favorable review, Reid offers a stylistic analysis of News of a Kidnapping and expounds on the events that inspired the book.

In late February of this year, just as Colombia was preparing to celebrate his seventieth birthday on March 6, Gabriel García Márquez announced from his house in Cartagena that he would not be present for the occasion. Colombia, he said, “had become an uncomfortable country, uncertain and troubling for a writer,” and he was exiling himself to Mexico, where he has lived intermittently for much of his writing life.

The reaction of most Colombians was more sorrowful than angry, although a few irritated columns appeared in the press. Even so, the country went ahead with its celebrations, and the newspapers of March 6 not only took notice of...