A Literary Thaw in South America

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa make up after a brawl thirty years ago. I am personally very delighted since both are my favorites.

A special edition of García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, to mark this year's 40th anniversary of its publication, is to include a prologue by Vargas Llosa. "Both men are in agreement over this," a spokesman for Spain's Royal Academy, which is publishing the edition, told the Guardian yesterday.

The agreement comes despite the fact the two have not spoken since they came to blows in a Mexican cinema in 1976. The book is to be published in March, when it will be presented to a meeting of national Spanish language academies from around the world at Medellín in Colombia.

The introduction is reported to be an excerpt from Vargas Llosa's laudatory book on García Marquez, published when the two were friends in 1971, called History of a Deicide. The Peruvian writer had apparently refused to allow the book to be republished after his falling out with García Marquez. He finally relented last year, adding it to a collection of his complete works in Spain. "There is no point in censoring a part of your life," he said at the time. Both writers have remained silent about the reasons for their brawl, except to say it was about something personal.

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