News of a Kidnapping (Vintage International) | 
|  | | | Title: | News of a Kidnapping (Vintage International) | | Author: | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Edith Grossman (Translator) | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 08 January, 2008 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1400034930 / 9781400034932 | | List Price: | $14.95 | | You Save: | $4.78 | | Amazon Price: | $10.17 | |
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Product Description
In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar – head of the MedellĂn drug cartel – kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, GarcĂa Márquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. He also depicts the keening ache of Colombia after nearly forty years of rebel uprisings, right-wing death squads, currency collapse and narco-democracy. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language and journalistic rigor, GarcĂa Márquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.
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During the 1980s, the government of Colombia signed a treaty with the United States allowing for the extradition of Colombian citizens. This caused a great deal of distress among the kingpins of the MedellĂn drug cartel. Why? Traffickers like Pablo Escobar had spent the decade exporting billions of dollars' worth of cocaine. They weren't likely to be arrested at home, but if extradited and tried in America, they would spend the rest of their lives in prison. Escobar and his colleagues tried to a cut a deal with the government. Then Escobar decided that a little extralegal pressure--i.e., terrorism--could do no harm. In short order he had 10 prominent Colombians kidnapped; most were journalists, and all had professional or personal ties to the pro-extradition movement. Ultimately two of the hostages were shot. The remaining eight were released in a trickle, as the drug traffickers began to break ranks and surrender. So ended at least one episode in what Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez calls "the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years." GarcĂa Márquez was originally invited to write about the kidnapping by Maruja Pachon, who spent six months in captivity. As he began to write, however, he realized that her story was inseparable from that of the other nine victims. The result is a meticulous, sobering, and suspenseful book. It is, of course, a work of reportage, which puts a lid on the author's penchant for magic realism. But in the hands of a writer like GarcĂa Márquez, truth makes fiction look paltry indeed.
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Customer Reviews:
• Bookstore Owners: Read Before You Clasify !!!!!! 23 October, 2003
When you walk into a bookstore and go to the history section, and look for latinamerican history, you will find this book there. It is absolutely outrageous that this book is sold as if it were titled "A History of Colombia".Kidnapping is a phenomena that has plagued Colombia for some time now, as it provides the economic means for the civil war in Colombia. However, kidnapping is not the axis our major point of our history.This very well written book is an account of a kidnapping from the inside. Gabo actually spoke to the people this happened to, and penned it nicely. This book is sad and reflects a reality which should only exist in nightmares.Worth it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A16CZRH9AZVKWW
• Well Documented, Well Translated 16 April, 2004
This is my first attempt at GGM's work. The author's writing style is very different in accounting the events happened during that kidnap saga. As he explains the events unfolding, he carefully adds the background information of the appropriate character(s) involved in the scene and he gets back to the present by providing the correct dose of the past. Though the reader aware of the victims killed, the heart races every time the government forces goof up and we wonder whom going to get killed. That means successful writing. The book details the exhaustive account of how all the sides acted during the period of kidnapping, how professionally and emotionally the victims' families handle the situations. The author explains them in a measured quantity rather than tiring the reader with too many deatils.The translation is great and I can't help feeling that Edith Grossman got into GGM's mind and translate it exactly what he was trying to put it. Very rare I come across a translator like that.Worth reading.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1FE2VY0OC35CE
• Garcia Marquez's Non-fiction 10 September, 2005
I bought this (Spanish edition) at a little shop in Montreal, expecting GGM's usual weird fiction. I was surprised to find that it wasn't weird fiction at all, but a true story (if such a thing exists). Actually, I was very disappointed throughout most of the book - it read like sappy "news" reporting in the US, all about what wonderful people the kidnap victims were, along with all their successful children & marvellous friends, etc. I had lived in Colombia for a couple of years just before the events in this book took place & was at least somewhat acquainted with some of the people & situations involved, and I am not that enthusiastic about them. The priveledged, educated, neo-liberal class in Colombia doesn't get an awful lot of sympathy from me - I was mostly surprised that GGM was so supportive of them - but then I realized that that is where he comes from. By the end of the book, I had to admit it was very intriguing & I'm glad I read it, but I think it's spoiled GGM for me, too. This book will probably change the way I see his fiction works.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A19NI0TME7TWSH
• GarcĂa Márquez As A Journalist 30 October, 2002
"News of a Kidnapping" reveals GarcĂa Márquez first passion: journalism. Though it's a novel, it's inspired on a series of real events that happened on Colombia several years ago. There's no evident criticism, but it reveals and illustrates the political situation of Colombia at that time (though it is still happening at the present). If you read this book, you're going to suffer both the hostages situations as their families' (as if you were either one). But besides the dramatical situations, what is extremely interesting is the way the events are narrated. The odd chapters narrate the kidnapped people situations, their suffering. The even chapters narrate their families situations. Though GarcĂa Márquez always tend to jump back and forward into time in the same page, here the plot is more lineal and, as i said before, more journalistic. Evidently, the kidnapping is one of the most awful crimes a human-being and his family can suffer, and by reading this, you will find out why.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3KRA3M3S2NHT3
• War, Through The Eyes Of Its Victims 21 February, 2008
Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez wrote News of a Kidnapping to tell the story of the ordeal of ten Colombian journalists who were abducted and held by Pablo Escobar's drug organization in 1993 and 1994. A native Colombian and Nobel Prize winner for fiction, GarcĂa Márquez weaves together the story of Maruja PachĂłn and the other captives, with the story of how Escobar and his Medellin cartel held their country in his power for years while he amassed a fortune, wreaked terror on ordinary people, and bargained for the right to be imprisoned in luxury in the place of his choosing.
Escobar captured prominent journalists Escobar to bring the attention of the country to his demands, and ultimately to have the assistance of the victims' families in making his extradition to the United States illegal. GarcĂa Márquez tells the stories in a linear fashion - clarifying the political, legislative and legal aspects of the story. At the same time, we see the arbitrary ordeal of the ten captives. Two of the abductees were eventually killed - one outright by the kidnappers and the other in confusion at a critical moment of release and rescue. The others are released over a period of months, after being moved from house to house, with changing groups of guards, and always the uncertainty of the outcome.
While GarcĂa Márquez clearly has little patience for Escobar and his group, he manages to give the stories a context that makes some sense of them, while acknowledging the inherent insanity of what happens through the long months of captivity, bargaining and exchange. He makes no overt judgments about how the captives, their families, and their guards acted. We are left to understand them through the memories of the months spent together in small spaces, under tension.
Pablo Escobar and his cartel have largely faded from our consciousness of the world today, replaced by other troubles in other places. So much of that drug war took place in a setting difficult to understand, and distressing in the way that far-off troubles can often be - alarming but distant, echoing in someone else's life. In this account, we see what it means to wait month after month without the solace of logic or hope that larger forces can come to our aid, at the mercy of chance, emotion, and the decisions of people we cannot control.
Armchair Interviews says: If you want an intense view of a country at war with itself through the eyes of its victims, pick up News of a Kidnapping. Then try one of Márquez's novels."
- Reviewed by customer ID: A21NVBFIEQWDSG
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