García Márquez’s fatal flaw, as ever, is his abundant male chauvinism. In his fiction, it’s pervasive and inescapable: inert matriarchs, enchanting prostitutes, and young girls constantly raped, killed, or killing themselves, rarely shown in possession of any interior life. In his nonfiction, it’s simply crass. Amused by the friendly rivalry between Venezuelan and Cuban student revolutionaries in the late 1950s, he laughs at the “triumphalist package” of women’s underpants they exchanged in the mail, figuring military triumph as sexual domination. Later, disappointed with “the commercial rigor of the Europeans” in the sex trade, he reminisces about Caribbean brothels, full of “lovely untamed mulatas who sold themselves more for the fiesta than for the money.” Most unapologetically, in 1982 he published “Sleeping Beauty on the Airplane,” a column nominally about Japanese literature that nevertheless mainly entailed fantasizing about a stranger who sat next to him on a recent flight. Minutely describing the woman’s “aura of oriental antiquity,” he informs the reader that he has “always believed that there is nothing more beautiful in nature than a beautiful woman.” Seeing the “plain band on her left hand,” he consoles himself with her youth, assuming “that it wasn’t a wedding ring but just that of a happy and ephemeral engagement.” This goes on for paragraphs before he makes a tenuous connection to Yasunari Kawabata’s 1961 novella House of the Sleeping Beauties, thus justifying the inches of newspaper he devoted to documenting his lust. García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following month.

For those who can persevere through these disappointing insights into García Márquez the literary figure, the anthology soars when it shows off his portfolio of actual journalism, which peaks with his work in his late twenties at the Bogotá daily El Espectador. In a playful profile of Colombia’s office of unclaimed letters (or, as he calls it, “the cemetery of lost letters”), he solemnly interviews the only three people in the country with legal authorization to open others’ correspondence, and documents the curiosities in the archive of unclaimed objects. It is tempting to seek out the seeds of magical realism between the piece’s poetic, ambiguous headings (“BROAD AND ALIEN IS THE WORLD”), but the aesthetic is closer to pure whimsy. Such a bizarre, loving tribute to a bureaucratic island would be more at home on Atlas Obscura than in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s almost twee. And for sheer delight, it beats out all his novels.

Meanwhile, though the editor’s note is somewhat apologetic about García Márquez’s reputation as a propagandist for Fidel Castro, the few Cuban pieces included are relatively mild in their politics. (Despite his sympathies, García Márquez was fond of reminding his readers that, as he had been racially profiled and mistakenly jailed in Paris, the Algerian Revolution was “the only one for which I’ve actually been imprisoned.”) The most emphatically anti-imperialist selection is his portrait of the first year of life on the island after the United States imposed a trade embargo, tellingly titled “The Cubans Face the Blockade.” “From the point of view of production,” he wrote, “Cuba soon found that it was not actually a distinct country but rather a commercial peninsula of the United States.” In his telling, the impact of the shortages was slow but intense, leading to ever-greater creativity in pitiful menu substitutions until armed shopkeepers end up fighting off robbers. While inevitably ideological, his fondness for the people’s perseverance remains the focus of his dispatches from Cuba:

That was the first Christmas of the revolution celebrated without suckling pig and turrón, and the first time toys were rationed. However, and thanks precisely to rationing, it was also the first Christmas in the history of Cuba when every single child, with no distinction whatsoever, had at least one toy.

There are dozens of such intriguing clips from García Márquez’s time as a foreign correspondent, but the story for which the collection is named is the one that really merits the price of admission. Right from its title, “The Scandal of the Century: In Death Wilma Montesi Walks the Earth” nails manic tabloid storytelling and refuses to let the reader go. Published in installments from Rome, the story covers the murder of a young ingénue—or was she?—and it has everything. Twists and turns include postmenstrual fainting spells, Jesuit conscience, drug traffickers, unscrupulous reporters, a pornography studio, and the son of the Minister of Foreign Relations. Each installment ends with a summary of soon-to-be-relevant evidence, called “The Reader Should Remember,” transformed most satisfyingly at last into “The Reader Should Know.” It’s a classic scandal (young woman’s murder, its dastardly cover-up) that García Márquez expertly complicates, one testimony at a time, until readers are left with nothing but the taste of good old Italian corruption in their mouths. The story is compelling precisely because we think we already know it. Like García Márquez’s tabloid readers, we too are inundated with true-crime narratives. His experimental form and dogged humor make this account genuinely innovative in a genre that could not be more done to death. When I finished reading it, my first thought was “I hope there’s a podcast.”

That’s the scandal, really. Not just that García Márquez, like so many men before him and since, had such a way with words about dead women, but that we have such an appetite for them.



The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings

Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Anne McLean, edited by Cristóbal Pera

Knopf, $27.95, 336 pp.