Morning Star Online - Reino unido

A recent survey of international writers found One Hundred Years Of Solitude to be the novel that most shaped world literature.

This 1967 benchmark work of magic realism - a style merging fact with fiction and fantasy with folklore in a carnivalesque fairytale reality - made the unknown Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez into a world celebrity.

His "official" biographer Gerald Martin claims that the book also "changed the world for its readers."

It certainly gave south America and by extension the Third World not only a literary but also a political voice.

Invested with his newfound fame, Garcia Marquez travelled the world over the following years, establishing relations with its leaders and peoples, becoming a kind of roving ambassador.

Coming from the legions of the dispossessed in the US-dominated, dictator plagued Latin American continent, he saw clearly and fought against the forces of imperialism - a struggle fired from the outset by a devotion to the Cuban revolution and what became a lifelong friendship with Fidel Castro.

Despite his exhausting engagement with leftist political causes he found time away from intensive journalism and film producing to continue writing creative fiction.

Among a range of works he produced another international success with Love in the Time Of Cholera, The General In His Labyrinth, a historical novel based on the life of Simon Bolivar, and a brilliant hostage-taking thriller-come-documentary, News Of A Kidnapping.

Martin's biography of a man he clearly admires and likes is however no mere love letter. He recognises change in Gabriel Marquez following his Nobel prize award in 1982.

The writer's residual sympathy and identification with men of power, sometimes irrespective of their political ideologies, led increasingly to a warring with his erstwhile commitment to the poor and dispossessed.

It has always been difficult however to place a man who constantly reinvented himself, retailing several versions of his life and telling Martin: "Whatever you write, that is what I'll be."

Martin is meticulous and exhaustive in his millimetric detailing of every personal and public step in his subject's long journey from the small Colombian town, fabulised in his great work as Macondo, to the capitals of the world.

Almost every page introduces new characters resulting in the same enigmatic confusion that besets the readership of One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

Readers in Britain, who are broadly sympathetic to a more stolid realism in fiction, have been generally unresponsive to the extravagancies of magic realism, although examples such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum surely feature in any major fictions imaginatively engaging with the real world.

Gerald Martin's portrait of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, now nearing 90, will be read with great interest by his enthusiastic followers and may well introduce the uninitiated to his intriguingly enigmatic novels.

He leaves us with a man - novelist, politician, philosopher - whose long life has embodied all the shifting ambiguities of the human psyche.