Critics have for a long time acknowledged the insight and artistry of Gabriel García Márquez's fictional representations of the mindsets – political, religious, cultural, and imaginative – of Latin American societies of contemporary and recent times. In the context of a colloquium on magical realism and fantastic modes of writing, the title story of the author's first major collection of short fictions, Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (Big Mama's Funeral) (1962), cries out for attention, representing, as it does, a landmark in García Márquez's evolution away from a realistic style of writing that he practised with few exceptions during the mid-nineteen-fifties, towards another mode that has variously been called ‘fantasy’, ‘magical realism’, and ‘a new brand of realism […] expanded and enhanced by magical improbabilities […]’. Featured as the last story in the eponymous collection, ‘Big Mama's Funeral’was also the last-written, dating, by most accounts, from the end of 1959. In addition to occupying a pivotal position in the author's output, there are also grounds for considering the story symptomatic of a moment of crisis in Latin American political history of the time. With this dual perspective in mind, the model of magical realism proposed by Stephen Slemon provides a yardstick for measuring the exactness of fit between ‘Big Mama's Funeral’ and that narrative mode, whilst the discipline of post colonial studies brings new and complementary perspectives to bear on a story whose ideological and technical complexities still remain to be appreciated in full.

La Marquesita de la Sierpe: A Living Legend

A review of work published on ‘Big Mama's Funeral’ uncovers a surprising blind spot, vis-à-vis connections with an earlier series of journalistic articles by García Márquez on a legendary figure known as La Marquesita de la Sierpe. As early as 1952, García Márquez had written about ‘una española bondadosa y menuda, dueña de una fabulosa riqueza […] a quien se conoció con el nombre de la Marquesita’ (a petite and kindly Spanish woman with fabulous wealth, who became known by the name ‘la Marquesita’).