Who Wrote It?

Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, 73, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In 1992 he had surgery for lung cancer. In 1999 he collapsed from exhaustion, and rumors spread that he had suffered a recurrence.

Is this Farewell a fraud, a sentimental exploitation, a tribute, a consolation? Gárcia Márquez's name is still on the masthead of his magazine, Cambio. This March, he wrote a strong-minded op-ed piece for The New York Times, Shipwrecked on Dry Land, about Elián González.

In an article in The New Yorker last year, John Lee Anderson wrote:

The widespread reverence that is felt for Gárcía Márquez amplified the rumors that began circulating early this summer about a mysterious illness that had overcome him. He was hospitalized for a week in the middle of June, and then he holed up in his apartment in Bogotá. He was said to be undergoing treatment for exhaustion, a nervous breakdown, or leukemia. Seven years ago, a cancerous tumor was removed from one of his lungs, and the rumors about what was wrong with him this time became more and more dire. On July 9th, someone pretending to represent a wire agency sent a phony news flash out through the Internet that he had died in Mexico City the previous evening.

Gárcía Márquez says that he began feeling unwell last spring, and became so weak that he was in a state of collapse. He checked into a hospital, and once it was determined what was wrong with him (lymphatic cancer, although this was not acknowledged publicly for several months) he began to receive treatment and to feel stronger. .

Gláucio Soares, who sent us the Farewell, writes:

"There is a discussion on if GGM really wrote this. Regardless of who wrote it, it is beautiful and I think that it might, just might, help some of us survivors and those who help us to survive to have a better perspective."

Garcia Márquez's works are listed on the site Macondo.