Well, ten years on, the new García Márquez novel is out (there's a fragment from it here) and very fine I'm sure it is too, with its first sentence definitely following the writing school rule that your first sentence should grab your reader's attention: "El año de mis noventa años quise regalarme una noche de amor loco con una adolescente virgen". Not everyone could get away with that. El País, as they always do whenever GGM does anything, have gone beserk and dedicated two pages to the event. But the finest literature in today's El País is to be found in the letters section of the Madrid supplement.

"My brother has died like a Tibetan in the Himalayas, only in Madrid. But it's not exactly like that. I'll try to explain. After having almost certainly taken an overdose, he must have fallen asleep at some point along the highway running between Fuencarral and El Pardo, near the town of Pitis. He died, and his body stayed there, exposed to the elements, for four months and ten days, until a gipsy woman alerted the police that there was a human being who appeared to be dead lying there..."

There follows an explanation of how the man was finally identified only by a tattoo on his left arm, a complaint about how poorly the case was handled by the police, and then this rather beautiful elegy:

"My brother was 34 years old, and a long-term consumer of heroin and cocaine. He was also a fantastic chess player, a professional masseur, a fan of high-risk sports who made trips out to the mountains whenever he could. Throughout his life, he had deep friendships and sublime love relationships; he sang and danced wonderfully, and he was an exquisite person, apart from being profoundly mistaken."

García Márquez would be proud. Nice move on the part of the letters editor, I'd say, treating us to that.

More literature/fun: Apparently, nobody had "sex" before 1929.

--------