After the astonishing success of One Hundred Years of Solitude when it was published in Buenos Aires in 1967, García Márquez and his family moved to Spain and took up residence, like other members of the ‘Boom’, in Barcelona. Although the whole literary world was begging for more Macondo, and he could probably have written profitable sequels to One Hundred Years of Solitude for years, García Márquez adopted Hemingway’s motto that every completed novel was a ‘dead lion’ and that you had to move on to something new. Nevertheless, in his case the new project was in fact an old one: the novel he had begun in Mexico and then abandoned, about an old Latin American dictator. Unlike his other novels at this stage of production, it already had a name: The Autumn of the Patriarch. It would be his most difficult work, both for him to write and for his audience to read. It took him almost seven years to complete and it would never be his most popular book.

Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1972)

During his first two or three years in Spain, when the new novel was proving difficult to write and, indeed, in order to make sure that it would be different from the books he had written before, García Márquez undertook a new sort of writing by producing a new short story collection, his third, with a different style. The collection, to be entitled Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, was begun in Mexico in the early 1960s but mainly written in Barcelona in the late 1960s and early 1970s. García Márquez has left Macondo and ‘the Town’ (indeed all towns) far behind for a world which is primitive, elemental and mythical. Most of these stories are set by the sea in places largely devoid of topographical or cultural characteristics, though the writer seems to be remembering the coastal villages between Cartagena and Santa Marta or imagining the Guajira he hardly knows, that desert zone between northeastern Colombia and Venezuela that his maternal ancestors were from. Sea, sky, desert, frontier: he seems to be like a painter who has radically altered his palette; the default colours seem to be white, blue and grey. One might say that the atmosphere is no longer the black and white world of De Sica and Zavattini’s neorealism – as in the stories of Big Mama’s Funeral – but the dreamy magical realist world of Fellini and Antonioni.