Today's Reason to Smile

Nobel Prize winning Colombian write Gabriel Garcia Marquez has kept fans waiting for a decade for his latest novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores. And with a title like that, anticipation has been extremely high. But when word got out of a pirated version hitting the Colombian streets early (a practice all too common there), the author of the contemporary classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera outwitted the scoundrels:

A last-minute change to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' new novel has dealt a blow to pirates who flooded his native Colombia with bootleg versions. Pirate copies of the book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, forced the author to rush-release the official version.

But the final chapter of the authorised story has been altered. [...]

"Check the pirate version that is coming out in Colombia compared to the legal version being launched today," editor Braulio Peralta told journalists in Mexico.

"All I'm saying is that Gabriel Garcia Marquez changed the last chapter."

We may never know if the original or final version was how Garcia Marquez truly wanted the book to end, but God bless him for sticking it to the pirates in such a clever, classy move.

Comments

[Jeremy Osner]

I dunno, seems to me this could increase demand for the pirated copies from people who want the set...

[Edward]

None of which hurts the author, though, Jeremy.

Folks wanting both is better than folks settling only for the pirated version.

[rilkefan]

Shades of _Great Expectations_.

[Stentor]

Beautiful.

[judson]

I just finished part 1 of his bio.."Living to Tell the Tale" outstanding...

[Gail]

I wonder if we'll see an upsurge in the magic realism genre from US, UK and Aussie writers now that we have the sort of political environment that gave rise to it in South America. I've always enjoyed the genre, but now I REALLY understand where they were coming from!