At a time of dire predictions about the future of the novel, García Márquez's prodigious imagination, remarkable compositional precision, and wide popularity provide evidence that the genre is still thriving. Although his dramatizations of the sinister forces threatening twentieth-centùry life imply strong moral indignation, his works are illumined by flashes of irony and the belief that human values are perennial. The amazing totality of his fictional world is also achieved through the contrapuntal juxtaposition of objective reality and poetic fantasy that captures simultaneously the essence of both Latin American and universal man. (p. 6)

García Márquez's approach to fiction indicates that he has come full circle in at least one respect, namely, in his depiction of subjective states of mind reminiscent of surrealism. Thus, whereas his early short stories are characterized by hermetic morbidity and fantasy, his [The Autumn of the Patriarch] is the...