The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings

I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the first good writer (ie, not Stephen King or Dean Koontz) that I obsessed over. Sometime in 2005 or '06 I read something by him, and then spent the next few months or years reading everything of his that I could get my hand on. Not everything was great, but a lot were, and even the not great ones were better than just about anything else I had read. Scandal was collected and published in 2019 and is a collection of writing from Marquez's time as a journalist.

Gabriel the novel writer and Gabriel the journalist have pretty much the same style. He reported stories with the same easy, magical style with which he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, and it made me long for show more the days of newspapers. Though none of the columnists I remember reading when I was a kid could hold a candle to Gabo.

About half of these columns are from before he became famous and the other half are from after; he took a pretty long break to write a bunch of world-changing novels. The pre-famous writing still has his unique style, but he's doing what a regular journalist does, and reporting on stories. After he became famous though, he seemed more comfortable telling stories from the past about adventures he had been on or famous people he had known. Neither part of the book is better than the other, it's just interesting to see the change.

I don't know if this book would interest many people. I don't know if it would have interested me if it hadn't been written by who it was written by, but it was a nice, quick, light read; something that I really feel like I needed. show less

50 short stories composed by Gabo, mostly newspaper column articles but also high quality magical realism.

Favorite chapters:
-Strange Idolatry of El Sierpe

-Man Arrives in the Rain-
reminds me of Pedro Paramo

Postman Rings a Thousand Times-
Borgian

Cubans Face the Blockade-
anatomy of a disintegrating national dream

Maria of My Heart

My Personal Hemingway

Return to the Seed-
'Anime' described as tiny beings who engaged in mischief in the house in Aracataca, naughty but benevolent. Curdled milk,changed the color of children's eyes, rusted locks, or provoked twisted dreams.

A selection of fifty journalistic pieces from the novelist as a young reporter. The writing itself is quite good and the collection is fascinating, however, with such a large sample, each entry is not of equal weight. I enjoyed the reminiscent ones more than the reporting examples. It is interesting this Novel Prize winning writer considered himself a journalist above all.