Six years had passed between the publication of The Autumn of thePatriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Thenew book, brief as it was, sold in its millions around the world and convincedthe critics that García Márquez was back with a vengeance andcapable, literarily speaking, of almost anything. In December 1982 the award ofthe Nobel Prize in Literature to the Colombian was probably the most populardecision made by the Swedish Academy in the second half of the twentiethcentury. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he pleaded for greater sympathyfor the Latin American continent from which he came and which, by now, he feltentitled to represent. He spoke of a region still unknown and neglected, aregion which was indeed magical but not in an irrational way, a regionconsistently subjected to the travesty of being judged by the standards ofEurope in terms of culture and politics when Europe, which had many unhappyghosts walking its corridors and skeletons rattling its closets, had taken athousand years to achieve what it expected Latin America to have achieved in twohundred. ‘Allow us to live out our own Middle Ages,’ he declared,‘so that our peoples, despite all their misfortunes, may have a secondchance upon the earth’.