Marquez is neither a magician nor a realist. In the Circular Ruins Borges discovers a man who dreams another man into existence. Marquez is that dreamer. He is a creator of men.Men who are so real that it seems like he has loved them long enough to be compassionate, and not judgemental towards them. What he has bequeathed me through his books is the men and women he has created. Not people who lived in the world at a certain time in a certain way but people in whom the world lived at a certain time in a certain way.
Rushdie is the magician. A conjurer of words. Words as precise as reason and as evocative as the heart itself. He pulls them out from his hat and they become the magic words to his world. They leap at you from the pages and hold you in so rapturous an embrace that you are bound to give yourself up to them despite their idiosyncrasies.
Calvino. Calvino, the cartographer. He makes maps of the places, people and ideas he has seen, lived and tended to. Maps which are so precise that sometimes they are as big as the place they outline. The experience is not emotional, sensual or metaphysical ( though some might disagree) but purely intellectual.
Borges is the creator of worlds. Worlds that have existed and will continue to exist before and after him exactly in the way he dreamed them. Worlds in whose infiniteness time and space are one and the same, unreal. Worlds where dreams are real and the real ephemeral. Worlds where everyman is every other man.
Imagine a city, made by Calvino, inhabited by a people created by Marquez, speaking a tongue coined by Rushdie and situated in a Borgesian universe.
Tony Xavier 