reader is beginning to get bored I immediately look for a way to enliven the book. And it was like that when I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. I felt that there were too many generations in it. That is the way it had been conceived for it was necessary to create a feeling of repetitiveness, of a cycle, but because of this it became boring. That's why in the middle of the book, in the part where Macondo is described after the war, I just decided to drop two generations. Later, when I read the book on the way to Geneva I felt that had I had the time I would have written everything carefully. Q One Soviet critic noted that you considered One Hundred Years of Solitude just a prelude to Autumn of the Patriarch. But we have been reading and rereading this book and each time we find something new in it. GGM I think after what you have said I should once again read One Hundred Years of Solitude. If you have found it so interesting perhaps it will be interesting for me to see what is so special in this book. I am familiar with many critical works, people have written so much about the book that I have long since ceased to read their articles. In any case I am biased against critics. I prefer a direct contact between the writer and the reader. When I write I always hope that I am writing for the reader and the book will reach him directly, bypassing all intermediaries. Some critics are inclined to tell the reader before he has read the book what the author wanted to say. And this means that the contact ceases to be direct. It is for this reason that I am against critics. I always feel that they are a barrier between the author and the reader. Sometimes I feel like saying, "Move aside. I want to speak to the readers and not to you." I have noticed that at times they invent such things which have not even entered the head of either the writer or the reader. Maybe it is correct, perhaps there is a lot in the book that has been suocons-ciously arrived at. And the critic looks for this subconscious, the existence of which the author is unaware of. And that is why I do not take to heart what the critics say, or else I look at it as something inevitable. As far as my saying that One Hundred Years of Solitude was a prelude to Autumn of the Patriarch, this is something new. I do not remember ever having said it. However, I do think more or less on the 32 January - March 1983