If you study Spanish in evening classes, it tends, even at intermediate level, to be language only; you’re unlikely to get a reading list of literature. So, Cervantes aside, what should you be reading?
The XIII Congress of Spanish Language Academies, held in Cartagena, Colombia, at the end of last month, threw up some suggestions. A panel of 81 writers, editors, academics and journalists brought together by the Colombian magazine Semana chose what they considered to be the best novels in Spanish published in the past 25 years. The top 10 included two works each by Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías, but first place went to Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.
It was a good month for Márquez. He celebrated his 80th birthday, the 25th anniversary of his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the 40th anniversary of the publication of the book that won it for him, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
At the time he finished that novel, Márquez was down on his luck and considering giving up writing. When he and his wife went to the post office to send the manuscript to his editor in Buenos Aires, they were told it would cost 83 pesos. They had only 53 pesos with them, so they sent half of it. “It was only later,” he recalled, “that we realised we hadn’t sent the first part but the second.” The editor was so keen to see how the book started that he advanced them cash to send the rest.