“... Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974), Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State (1974), Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and now Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000). The time lag is probably significant, since the latest book is the most literal and least hypnotised of the four. This is a virtue, but not ...”

“... to be set in the village and the jungle, as in the exemplary magical-realist ‘world novel’, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which was written in one ‘world’ language (Spanish) and translated into another, English, three years after its first appearance. Franco Moretti has speculated that this novel and others like ...”