long memories
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was once asked why Latin Americans wrote such long novels to which he replied cryptically, "Because we have such long memories!" Memories, to Latin Americans, have always meant memories of fire, of the great dictators, supported by the imperialism of the Big Brother in the north, of hundreds of years of solitude and oppression of passions aroused and passions betrayed. Memory then, as Rao Basto says in I the Supreme is "the stomach of the soul" and when memory is awakened by imagination then what we get is a novel of tremendous vitality: the past interceding with the present in the linear developments of the narrative and together looking at a future that never seems to arrive and "if" it arrives it's too late. And because the concept of time for the Latin Americans is circular, their novels have been described as a labyrinth, rather like the labyrinth of life itself which has made it the most astounding literature of our times.