REALITY IS THE BETTER WRITER.

POLITICAL participation; AUTHORS; SOCIAL conflict; COLLECTIVE memory; MYSTERY fiction

On October 26, 1949, in the city of Cartagena on Colombia's Caribbean coast, a young journalist named Gabriel García Márquez went to the convent of Santa Clara to see its crypt being emptied prior to the building's demolition. Even as García Márquez attained global renown as a writer of fiction, neither his journalism nor his radical commitments tailed off. García Márquez threw himself into editorial work, cofounding the left-wing magazine Alternativa in Bogotá in 1974, which aimed to weaken the long-standing hold on the media by Colombia's elites. Instead, The Scandal of the Century gives us a rather different kind of figure, devoting a third of its pages to the columns that García Márquez wrote for El País in the '80s. [Extracted from the article]

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