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“... course, the sheer beauty of his sentences and of his images (helped into English, once again, by Gregory Rabassa, who, along with Grass’s translator Ralph Manheim, must be the very best in the business), the dry wit, and the unequalled talent for rooting his fabulous imagination firmly in the real world. Chronicle is speech after long silence. For a ...”

“... A reader who has some acquaintance with Garcia Marquez is almost bound to approach a new novel by him with certain questions about connectedness in mind. There is first of all the issue of the connectedness of his career: which resolves itself at once into questions about the origins of, and successors to, the extraordinary One Hundred Years of Solitude ...”

“... You killed my character!’ Clarice Lispector said angrily to the nurse who stopped her from marching out of hospital the day before she died of ovarian cancer, aged 57, in 1977. The Brazilian writer and her characters had always been close, and it seems that self and creation had finally merged in her mind. Others had already made the connection ...”

“... Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’ a girl thinks in The Dark Hole Days, ‘but surely all my dreams don’t end here: me in a duffle coat signing on the dole and walking in the debris of Belfast.’ Later she adds: ‘Belfast would fit into a corner of London ...”

“... Polizzotti remarks. The translator is simply another writer of the same book, for better or worse. Gregory Rabassa, asked if his Spanish was up to rendering García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, responded that the real question was whether his English ...”