Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, metamorphosed into a large insect, would not feel out of place in Macondo, where metamorphoses are treated as commonplace. Gogol’s Kovalyov, whose nose detaches itself from his face and wanders around St. Petersburg, would also feel at home. The French Surrealists and the American fabulists are also of this literary company, inspired by the idea of the fictionality of fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea that unshackles literature from the confines of the naturalistic and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps more interesting, routes. García Márquez knew very well that he belonged to a far-flung literary family. William Kennedy quotes him saying, “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets.” And then: “The Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.”

But, to say it again: The flights of fancy need real ground beneath them. When I first read García Márquez I had never been to any Central or South American country. Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with a strong colonial history, and in both places religion is of great importance and God is alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly.

I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it — not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous “wonder tales” of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism. My world was more urban than his, however. It is the village sensibility that gives García Márquez’s realism its particular flavor, the village in which technology is frightening but a devout girl rising up to heaven is perfectly credible; in which, as in Indian villages, the miraculous is everywhere believed to coexist with the quotidian.

He was a journalist who never lost sight of the facts. He was a dreamer who believed in the truth of dreams. He was also a writer capable of moments of delirious, and often comic, beauty. At the beginning of “Love in the Time of Cholera”: “The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” At the heart of “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” after the dictator sells the Caribbean to the Americans, the American ambassador’s nautical engineers “carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons.” The first railway train arrives in Macondo and a woman goes mad with fear. “It’s coming,” she cries. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.” And of course, unforgettably:

“Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized 32 armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had 17 male children by 17 different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of 35. He survived 14 attempts on his life, 73 ambushes and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.”

For such magnificence, our only possible reaction is gratitude. He was the greatest of us all.