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Today's News | News of Jan 12, 2007
García Marquez, Vargas Llosa end
Long-running Feud

London, Jan 12
One of the 20th century's top literary feuds seems to have come to a happy end. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's introduction to Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez is set to be included in the 40th anniversary edition of the latter's masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude".

The new edition, coming out in March, is to include a prologue by Vargas Llosa. "Both men are in agreement over this," the Guardian quoted a spokesman for Spain's Royal Academy, which is publishing the edition, as saying.

Though the duo, arguably the two South American authors with most fan following across the world, have shared a close relationship, it soured in the 1970s and ended with a punch-up in a Mexican cinema in 1976.

Both writers have remained silent about the reasons for their brawl, except to say it was about something personal.

While both had shared leftist leanings in the 1960s, their political paths also diverged later: García Marquez remains a close friend of Cuban President Fidel Castro while Vargas Llosa turned right and unsuccessfully contested presidential elections in Peru in the 1990s.

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 the Peruvian author's laudatory book on the Columbian master, "García Marquez: History of a Deicide", published in 1971 - when the two were still friends.

After falling out, Vargas Llosa had reportedly refused to allow any republication of the work. He, however, relented last year, adding it to a collection of his complete works in Spain, and said: "There is no point in censoring a part of your life. 

IANS News of Jan 12, 2007

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