Controversy between GGM and MAA

Gabriel García Márquez (GGM), born in Colombia in 1927, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, said during an interview that readers searched and wanted something new, that the writers nowadays go on narrating the miseries of Latin American countries.

When Miguel Ángel Asturias (MAA), born in Guatemala in 1899, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, got to know about GGM’s declaration, said that he (MAA) thought that that was to be precise the kind of Literature that one must appropiate nearly always, because things being so we shall have to, because as long as it’s like this, we can still fix it, because our countries suffered and suffer today and it will be so if we writers stop to tell our miseries to do something new, to make Literature in the European style, that doesn’t corresponds to us.

MAA says that GGM in his book A hundred years of solitude transferred the argument and the characters of La recherche de l’absolu by Honoré de Balzac.