58 SOCIAL SCIENTIST complete aloofness from the outside world, is bound to end in smoke, a fate met by the village Macondo. The queer happenings, like dying several times, denotes the uncertainty, instability and insecurity of Latin American societies in a state of flux. Marquez, thus, is a "fantastic" representative of "magical realism", by all reckonings the modern Latin American version of realism. The inclination in Marquez has been conditioned by his life as well. The first eight years of his life he spent with his grand-parents, whom he described as people of "imagination and superstition". His grandmother narrated stories of ghosts and spirits and of dialogues with dead relatives. He considers his grandfather, who died when Garcia Marquez was eight, as the "most important person" in his life; "since then nothing interesting has happened to me". The novel The Autumn of the Patriarch has made Marquez more popular because of its panoramic description, political comment and fantastic realism. A long monologue of a dictator who is to be executed at the age of 123 years, it presents a prototype of the Latin American dictators of the last two generations—Trujillo, Somoza, Batista etc. He projects facts which are grotesque but real, fantastic and absurd but true of the Latin American continent. After the publication of this novel Garcia Marquez had declared that he would not write till the fascist dictator Pinochet of Chile was deposed, but could not remain silent in the face of injustice and repression. Last year Marquez published Chronicles of a Death Foretold —a story about a bloody incident in Colombia. It is a fictional account in typical Marquezian style. After becoming the Nobel Laureate, Marquez told a correspondent: tt! have the impression that in giving me the prize they have taken into account the literature of the sub-continent and have awarded me as a way of awarding all of this literature.'" Jose Marti, great poet, philosopher and liberator not only of Cuba but of the whole of the Hispano-American continent, had once said: "When there will be a Hispanic American Continent there will be Hispano-American Literature." Marquez is an eloquent representative of the "Hispano-American Literature". VIBHA MAURYA* *Lecturer in Spanish, Department of Modern European Languages, University of Delhi.