Vonnegut, Fuentes, and now García Márquez. All three departed the world during spring, and I can remember each sharp sadness fully. When you fall in love with a living author’s work, it’s as if there is a tacit companionship—a lighted tunnel between the two of you. But then the brief candle flickers out.

Whether it’s for sanity, serenity, or mere serendipity, novels compel us. They recount the permutations of human experience—love, loneliness, death, desire, and nostalgia—in an espresso-like concentration of vicarious thrill. They are the autodidact’s ambrosia.

Vonnegut lampooned the world’s absurdity for me, Fuentes laid the sometimes-sordid foundations of power bare to me, but Gabriel García Márquez taught me how to dream.

It was love at first line.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Who can read that opening of his greatest work “One Hundred Years of Solitude” without the exhilaration of wonderment—a momentary relapse into dreamy childhood where you can just stroll through the immaculate scenery of García Márquez’s mind.

I spent many months here, ambulating through the supernatural writing, lost in the optics: the clouds of yellow butterflies that hover around Mauricio Babilonia, Father Nicanor’s levitation after drinking a cup of hot chocolate, Juvenal Urbino’s fateful ladder fall while rescuing his pet parrot from the mango tree, and the haunting tableau of the palace of the unspeakably powerful patriarch, overrun with cows after his death.

I never knew you were allowed to write like that. And I devoured as much as I could.

I didn’t know that writing about the supernatural with journalistic precision and matter-of-factness could so beautifully neutralize the effect, the way that the people shrug at the very old man with enormous wings once another circus trick comes to town.

“If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you,” García Márquez once remarked.

When you destabilize the magic of the impossible, the stuff that’s real becomes all the more wondrous. A first introduction to ice stays memorable 16 years later.

But these were never just pretty stories. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” reads like a phantasmic Book of Genesis with generation after generation suffering the same story—Macondo is a place where time circles on itself rather than pass, linking the archaic origin story with the political strife of later days. The 32 insurrections led by Colonel Buendía and the 3,000 banana plantation workers massacred allude too much to the political discord of the last century in Latin America for the novel to be a self-contained, solipsistic unit.