In Evil Hour, begun in 1956, abandoned for a while, then finished in 1961, is a novel which belongs to the period of García Márquez's idolatry of the cinema. It doesn't have the verve or the tone of the narrative invention of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it does have other virtues. It is intensely visualized, as befits García Márquez's beliefs at the time, and it has pieces of dialogue which would be a credit to any movie, but especially those Hollywood movies where a delicate edge of parody is what keeps the night-mare away. Every shape is a little too clear and the book moves toward travesty: a comic version of what William Empson called a style learned from despair, except that here the style is in the way you avert your face, turn away from the despair you would see if you looked...