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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

> Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922.

Amazing. In school we read the other two authors quite extensively, yet never anything by Asturias.

The double edge of first mover advantage?

Anyway, thankful for the genre and the amazing stories these great writers have left us.

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c. the 90s I was taught Asturias and other members of El Boom like Gabriel Cabrera Infante, and Julio Cortázar, and also Borges and Isabel Allende, in English at the undergraduate level...

but that was by a particularly contemporary and enlightened professor of contemporary literature...

Super recommend: Blow-Up and Other Stories by Cortázar and of course for anyone who somehow hasn't read it Borges' Labyrinths... the latter in particular is full of ideas which resonate more ever more significance...

Love Cortázar

Haven’t read Labyrinths, thank you for the recommendation

Universal all-purpose Borges recommendation:

"You should read Jorge Luis Borges's short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote'. It’s only six pages long, and you'll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you." - Douglas Adams

well, eight pages, in my edition....

https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

Incredible, thanks.

Labyrinth is incredible. It took me a while to grasp it and I still might've missed its point, but it was almost an epiphany like experience for me to understand that knowledge is discovered rather than created. On a fundamental level I've always understood that, but understanding that everything we will ever know as a species already exists as knowledge as is just to be discovered really changed my views.

Edit: can also really recommend The Southern Thruway by Cortázar

I can also recommend Cortázar's "The Southern Thruway" (La autopista del Sur). I read it by accident, more or less, in a short story collection. Still have to read Labyrinths by Borges...

Marquez was also inspired by Kafka's Metamorphosis, which was published in 1915.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/may/09/gabr...

Never really felt like reading Metamorphosis or Kafka again

But at the time, it felt like such an incredible adventure

Thank you for the article and references

The new(ish) translations from Schocken Editions are a big improvement over what was available in the 20th century. Re-reading The Trial last month was a revelation.

In an interview, García Máquez, on reading the first sentence of The Metamorphosis, stopped reading and asked himself, is it possible to do this?

The biggest influence on Marquez, according to Marquez himself, was Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955), which is a masterpiece. Borges considered it one of his favourite books, but it's still almost forgotten in the English-speaking world. Highly recommended to anyone who likes magical realism.

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