GARCÍA MARQUEZ (GABRIEL, b. 1928, novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982) IMPORTANT SERIES OF SEVEN LETTERS, in Spanish, to the writer and critic Alfredo Iriarte, comprising three autograph letters (one on a lettercard) and four typed letters, all signed with his nickname 'Gabo', openly and informally discussing his work and criticisms of it, particularly his major novel One Hundred Years of Solitude ('...the incestuous calling of Amaranta is not a negative aspect of her character; in fact it is the most positive and determining one. I believe that she was predestined to conceive the child with the pig's tail who would ultimately put an end to the family line, and that she lacked the courage to face her destiny. Hence her bitterness, which is a consequence of her cowardice...it is true that Ursula Iguarán, in the fogginess of senility, analyses the character of her daughter Amaranta. But despite those who believe that here the author has spoken through one of his characters, I believe that Ursula's analysis is wrong...'); also discussed are the novel's connections with other earlier works, including No One Writes to the Colonel ('...the colonel...as a very young man, with his eyes the colour of amber and his habit of clenching his teeth before speaking, appears in the chapter in One Hundred Years in which the treaty of 'Neerlandia' is signed...') and Leaf Storm ('...it is true that Leaf Storm contains all the precedents which you mention. But there are others: there it is stated clearly that there would be a final storm which would ravage Macondo, it is emphasised that it will be an auspicious storm, and the old colonel who is going to bury the doctor knows that his destiny is unavoidable, because for some time he has had the fixed impression that everything that happens in Macondo obeys the fulfilment of a prophesy...'); he outlines future plans for writing ('...My main problem now is getting rid of the huge ballast of the prose style of One Hundred Years of Solitude...I work without haste, but with more difficulties and doubts than ever, on a series of children's stories which I do not intend to publish, as they have a very concrete professional aim...I am trying to take apart and dismantle the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, in an effort to come up with something completely new, so that the next novel does not profit, either voluntarily or involuntarily, from the commercial and critical success of the previous one...'), and anticipates his work on The Autumn of the Patriarch ('...I don't think that 1968 will be the year for The Autumn of the Patriarch: twelve months is a very short time for such an ambitious novel...it threatens to be the longest and most boring ever written...its author was not brave enough to write it in verse...and so the result was almost a prose work with rhymes and scans...In any case, there is a certain merit to treating a sordid and bloody theme in a completely lyrical style. I try to show, perhaps, that even in shit there is poetry...'); additionally, García Marquez comments on the difficulties of being a writer ('...It seems that the writer's profession is the only one that can never be learnt. One always has to begin again as though it were the first time. Each word is like giving birth...') and reveals his attitude to critics ('...when I sit down to write, I intend to tell a good story, and so all those connotations which people like you find can only have been put there by some guardian demon which I carry inside...I handle critics as if with a pair of tongs, and more so all the time, because I keep on failing to understand their place in the world; I am writing this paragraph to one of them, although the rest of this letter is written to a friend with whom I would like to get hopelessly drunk at this moment, and at many others too...'); one letter is devoted to giving detailed instructions to Iriarte about a $10,000 cheque from the University of Oklahoma intended for a fund to help political prisoners, and states what Iriarte's responsibilities are as García Marquez's personal representative ('...you must keep all receipts and invoices of all payments...in case the probity of the management of the fund is ever called into question...this cheque...has a symbolic role...'), and in another letter he explains his position regarding copyright and television programmes about his work produced by university students ('...I support [the students] as far as I can, but we both have to treat television as a system which uses our work for its survival, rather than as a company which is doing us a favour...'); other subjects include a trip to Andalucía and Paris, the student protests of 1968 ('...I imagine that your wife is busy throwing stones at the moment. I would advise her to leave the revolution to others, and to devote herself to perfecting her cooking...'), and a request for a recording of young whales for his mobile tape recorder built especially for his travels; elsewhere he mentions James Joyce ('...they will give [the prize] to Gossain, for the titanic effort he made to read Joyce's Ulysses...') and in an undated letter García Marquez announces the title of his novel The General in his Labyrinth on the eve of its publication in 1989 ('...it would be good to make it [the title] public before it is stolen: I will leave it to your legendary discretion...'), 11 pages, folio, small quarto and octavo, La Habana in Cuba (on a card from the Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano) and Mexico City [no place on five of the letters], 3 January 1968, 1 April 1968, 2 March 1970, 4 June 1970, July 31 1973, and two letters undated

This is the most important, and possibly the only series of letters of Gabriel García Marquez to have come onto the market; certainly none have appeared for auction in the last twenty-five years recorded in American Book Prices Current. The series provides major insights into the thought processes and writing methods of one of the most widely read and highly regarded novelists of the second half of the twentieth century.

García Marquez met Iriarte in the aftermath of the success of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was published in June 1967, and to which he refers frequently in these letters. During the time covered by this series, he was working on his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about which he says in one of the letters that it 'will be the most boring novel ever written, although this might itself be an achievement.' True to the theme of dictatorship in this novel, he had moved to Barcelona in the late 1960s; it is likely that some of these letters were sent from Spain, which was at the time still under Franco's rule.

With the series are two typed letters signed by Alfredo Iriarte, officially stamped in February 1995: in one he states that Iriarte met García Marquez in Bogotá towards the end of 1967, and that the present letters were sent to him by the author between 1968 and 1973; in the other he declares that the undated letter in which the title of The General in his Labyrinth is revealed was written well after 1973, since it was sent on the eve of the novel's publication in 1989. Iriarte is addressed in these letters as 'Maestro' ('Master'), 'Hermanazo' ('dear brother'), 'Mi querido Alfredo' ('my dear Alfredo') and 'Gabólogo insigne' (literally 'eminent Gabologist', referring to Iriarte's work as García Marquez's critic).

£6,500