Having had fun with Introducing Kafka because I'm a fan of R. Crumb's drawing and the summaries of the books were nicely done in both words and text, I tried a book about an author whose early work I know fairly well in a similar series of illustrated introductory volumes. But Garcia Marquez for Beginners, written by Mariana Solanet and illustrated by Hector Luis Bergandi, isn't as much fun. The writing is uneven on several levels, including many ways of referring to the author -- Gabriel, Garcia Marquez, GGM, Gabo, Gabito -- used with no particular relation to content of the text. Another problem is the puffery, which a Nobel Prize-winning novelist really doesn't need, and Ms. Solanet is not Colombian so if it's local pride it's for all South America.

But more disruptive were the illustrations -- and after all this is essentially a comic book with bibliography and index -- which represented GGM in such different ways that one could hardly think it was the same person. Most often he looked a lot like Groucho, which I certainly have never felt about any photos I've seen, and the level of detail was uneven, sometimes presenting a simple flat sketch, sometimes a hyper-realistic rendition with every crease, wrinkle, ridge, furrow, and expression hugely magnified in horrible 3-D. There seemed no point to this, as there wasn't to the use of names ranging from formal to diminutive-affectionate.

Taking a step back and looking at this and the Kafka book together, they are precisely NOT good for beginners or as introductions; rather these author books are for those of us who know at least the major works fairly well and have an idea of their position in the world of letters and would just like to revisit the stories and wallow in a bit of biography (e.g., GGM's enduring friendship with Fidel Castro. Therefore I know that Kafka is not in fact primarily a Jewish writer, no matter how much the author of Introducing Kafka talks about that; reading him is not like reading, say, Aharon Appelfeld -- or Philip Roth, despite his Kafka tribute The Breast. And I know the innovation and power of what is now called magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which are talked into nothingness here. The innovation and intensity that make The Autumn of the Patriarch such a powerful work are barely suggested here. In short, they don't encourage reading the authors themselves: that has to be done in advance.

Nevertheless, these aren't the last of these supposedly introductory books I'm going to read; the pleasure, though, isn't where it's advertised to be, but in critically reading about known authors.