Fidel Castro reflects on Gabriel Garcia Márquez on the occasion of the publication of his autobiography: “He and I share a scandalous theory on the relativity of words in language. Also, as a public man obliged to write speeches and narrate events, I agree with the illustrious writer on the delight of finding the exact word – a kind of shared and inexhaustible obsession – until the phrase fits our criteria. Above all, I admire the fact that when an exact word doesn’t exist, he calmly invents one. How I admire that licence of his!

Now, with the publication of his autobiography, we have Gabo on Gabo. A book of his memories, a work that conjures up nostalgia for the thunder at four in the afternoon, which was the time of lightning and magic that his mother Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán missed when she was far away from Aracataca, the unpaved village of eternal torrential rain, traditions of alchemy, the telegraph and turbulent, sensational love which populates Maconda, the small town found in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” —Guardian.UK [via walker]