Six years had passed between the publication of The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The new book, brief as it was, sold in its millions around the world and convinced the critics that García Márquez was back with a vengeance and capable, literarily speaking, of almost anything. In December 1982 the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Colombian was probably the most popular decision made by the Swedish Academy in the second half of the twentieth century. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he pleaded for greater sympathy for the Latin American continent from which he came and which, by now, he felt entitled to represent. He spoke of a region still unknown and neglected, a region which was indeed magical but not in an irrational way, a region consistently subjected to the travesty of being judged by the standards of Europe in terms of culture and politics when Europe, which had many unhappy ghosts walking its corridors and skeletons rattling its closets, had taken a thousand years to achieve what it expected Latin America to have achieved in two hundred. ‘Allow us to live out our own Middle Ages,’ he declared, ‘so that our peoples, despite all their misfortunes, may have a second chance upon the earth’.