One of the literary world’s most famous fights appears to have been mended. A special edition to mark the 40th anniversary of Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is slated for publication this year, and will include a prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez’s one-time close friend. “Both men are in agreement over this,” a spokesman for Spain’s Royal Academy, which is publishing the edition, told the Guardian yesterday, even though the two authors famously came to blows at a Mexican cinema in 1976 and haven’t spoken since.
The introduction is reported to be an excerpt from Vargas Llosa’s laudatory book on GarcÃa Marquez, published when the two were friends in 1971, called HISTORY OF A DEICIDE. The Peruvian writer had apparently refused to allow the book to be republished after his falling out with GarcÃa Marquez. He finally relented last year, adding it to a collection of his complete works in Spain. “There is no point in censoring a part of your life,” he said at the time. Both writers have remained silent about the reasons for their brawl, except to say it was about something personal.
GarcÃa Marquez, who published a first volume of memoirs four years ago, is resisting writing a second volume, reportedly because he does not want to go into the reasons behind that fight. “I have realized that if I write the second volume, I will have to tell things that I do not want to tell about certain personal relationships that are not at all good,” he said in an interview with Spain’s La Vanguardia newspaper last year.