Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known as South America's William Faulkner with good reason. Both added new territory to the map of fiction. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is an imaginary county that contains nearly all one needs to know about the old South, the Lost Cause and the rise of the scalawag class. Garcia's Macondo is a conjured region of Colombia's Caribbean coast that holds the essence of Latin America's ruinous history. The power of these microcosmic worlds brought Nobel Prizes to both men and ensured their subsequent work the utmost attention.
Faulkner endured but did not prevail after Stockholm. Booze and boredom can...