bottle of liquor and leave him with a radio so he, too, can follow the game.

Unfortunately, their plan does not succeed, for Pacho, a devoted Santafé fan, gets so angry with the tie score that he cannot even enjoy the liquor. This paragraph is a surreal masterpiece. Each sentence presents an utterly ludicrous proposition, but the one that builds upon it is even more so. The paragraph' s culminating lines, however, bring the narrative back down to earth and remind Pacho, along with the reader, of the danger inherent to the situation: "When it [the game] was over, he saw himself on the nine-thirty news on file footage, wearing a dinner jacket and surrounded by beauty queens. That was when he learned his driver was dead."

Throughout News of a Kidnapping, the media plays a powerful role, contributing to the overall absurdism that sometimes overtakes the menacing situation. For example, it provides fodder for even more bizarre incidents at the different safehouses. The newspaper reports on Pacho's kidnapping are "so inaccurate and fanciful they made his captors double over with laughter." Meanwhile, Maruja's guards' reactions to a family television program celebrating her birthday are even more astonishing; they express their hope that "Maruja would introduce them to her daughters so they could take them out."

The media's dissemination of information between the captives and their families also verges on the surreal. After a frantic call from one of Maruja's captors about the medicine she needs to take for her circulation problems, a "mysterious announcement appeared at the bottom of the screen during the sports segment of a television newscast: 'Take Basotón.''' In keeping with the lack of reality, "the spelling was changed"—the medicine is really Vasotón—"to keep an uninformed laboratory from protesting the use of its product for mysterious purposes." Overall, however, the media fails to fulfill its supposed role of broadcasting truthful information, and this may stem from the fact that the media blitz about the kidnappings resembles entertainment rather than reportage. This inadequacy is perhaps nowhere so succinctly expressed as in a special correspondent's question to a sports editor upon learning that the last two hostages will be released: '''What do you think of the news?'''

Of all the hostages, Pacho, the journalist, maintains the closest relationship to the media and follows current news sources. However, his ties to the media take on an uncanny aura. His family uses the editorial pages of El Tiempo to publish personal notes to communicate with him. Toward the end of his captivity, depressed at his failure to escape, Pacho determines to take his own life. The next day, he reads a newspaper editorial in El Tiempo, ordering Pacho "in the name of God not to even consider suicide." Later, Hernando Santos tells his son that the editorial had actually been on his desk for three weeks, but "without really knowing why he had been unable to decide if he should publish it, and on the previous day—again without knowing why—he resolved at the last minute to use it." Ironically, the guard who had the job of bringing Pacho the newspaper each day had a "visceral hatred of journalists"; in a sense, his anger represents the abductors' failed attempts to isolate their hostage.

Escobar himself is the most potent symbol of the surrealism of Colombian society. One of Escobar's haciendas near Medellín is something of a private playground with a zoo populated by "giraffes and hippos brought over from Africa." At its entrance, Escobar displays, "as if it were a small monument, the small plane used to export the first shipment of cocaine." More tellingly, however, is the way the Colombian citizenry reacts to the kingpins, particularly Escobar. As García Márquez writes, "Years earlier the drug traffickers had been popular because of their mythic aura. . . . If anyone had wanted them arrested, he could have told the policeman on the corner where to find them.'' In his hometown, Escobar is seen as a modern-day Robin Hood for his charitable works in the barrios. "At the height of his splendor, people put up altars with his pictures and lit candles to him in the slums of Medellín," García Márquez tells readers. "It was believed he could perform miracles." More privileged Colombians, such as the politicians, businesspeople, and journalists, are similarly taken in by the Escobar charisma and power. After meeting the drug kingpin, even Father García Herreros declares, "Escobar is a good man.''

Further, the methods that Escobar, a "legend who controlled everything from the shadows," employs to throw the police off his tracks mirror the utter lack of reality and openness in Colombia; "He had employees who spent the day engaging in lunatic conversations on his telephones so that the people monitoring his lines would become entangled in mangrove forests of non sequiturs and not be able to distinguish them from the real messages." While García Márquez is simply reporting the facts, he also is making important narrative choices. By using words such as lunatic and non sequiturs and emphasizing that "real messages'' are actually being conveyed, García Márquez heightens the absurdism inherent to Escobar and his society. Escobar delivers one such "real message'' to Villamizar in person: "If any of you feels unsafe, if anybody tries to give you a hard time, you let me know and that'll be the end of it." In this world, the bizarre becomes commonplace, the absurd becomes real, and one of the deadliest men alive can also be a man of honor.

Toward the end of the book, Villamizar visits the Ochoa brothers in prison; their entire families are present and the wives ''acted as hostesses with the exemplary hospitality of the Medellinese." Villamizar and the three brothers work together in order to devise a plan to get Escobar to agree to a meeting. This collaboration between the politician who prevented the extradition treaty from being blocked by law and three leaders of the Medellín cartel lends a final note to the surrealist atmosphere of Colombia in 1990.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on News of a Kidnapping, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

Like The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1986), a piece of journalism that was later adapted into book form, News of a Kidnapping (1997) chronicles actual events that, at first glance, may read as fiction. The book examines a turbulent period in Colombia's history, one that presaged an even more violent time to come. According to García Márquez, he wrote this book so that the "gruesome drama'' of the kidnappings would not "sink into oblivion." One of the reasons why News of a Kidnapping succeeds as both reportage and literature is García Márquez's use of fictional devices and techniques to reveal, in poignant and memorable detail, the lives of ten individuals held hostage.

In 1990, barely three weeks after César Gaviria took office as Colombia's president, a series of kidnappings occurred that directly challenged his authority and focused the attention of a nation already divided by civil war. The Extraditables, a group of narcotraffickers led by Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín cartel, abducted various members of the media to guarantee that they would not, as their name indicates, be extradited to the United States, where an effective and unyielding judicial system awaited them. "We prefer a grave in Colombia to a cell in the United States,'' was their rallying cry. As García Márquez points out with irony, the only choice the drug traffickers had to save themselves was to place themselves in the custody of the state. Before Escobar and the Extraditables are willing to capitulate, however, they engage in "indiscriminate, merciless terrorism'' to force the government's position.

To tell the story of such a campaign and the effect it had upon Colombian politics and society required a narrative framework that would accommodate many points of view. García Márquez describes how he solved this problem in the book's Acknowledgments. Upon realizing that the kidnappings "were not, in fact, ten distinct abductions—as it had seemed at first—but a collective abduction of ten carefully chosen individuals, which had been carried out by the same group and for only one purpose," he revised the book's structure. Had García Márquez written solely about the abduction of Maruja Pachón and the attempts of her husband, Alberto Villamizar, to negotiate her release, the narrative would have become, in the author's words, "confused and interminable." The book's narrative structure would have been insufficient for a story of such wide scope.

By narrating events from the perspectives of several characters, a technique he has used often in his fictional writings, García Márquez offers a panoramic view of the crisis and the people it involved. The author also imbues News of a Kidnapping with a sense of humanity that makes it easy for the reader to identify with the plight of the hostages. This narrative approach renders the ambiguity and the complexity of their ordeal with a degree of verisimilitude greater than mere journalism could afford.

García Márquez opens the book in medias res (in the middle of things) by describing the abduction of Maruja and her sister-in-law, Beatriz. This creates a sense of immediacy that serves to make the abduction more indelible in the reader's mind. Knowing that Maruja and Beatriz were the last of the journalists to be abducted, the reader begins to wonder about the eight previous kidnappings and how they were orchestrated. García Márquez sows the seeds of speculation in the reader's mind and thus brings into play an essential ingredient in the act of storytelling: the reader's imagination. Had he told the story of Maruja and Beatriz's abduction in the past tense, the event would not have been rendered as vividly and, consequently, the narration of the other eight kidnappings would not have unfolded with as profound a sense of anticipation on the part of the reader.

García Márquez then describes the abduction of Diana Turbay, the director of the television news program Criptón, and her film crew. The reader is now aware of how the first and last kidnappings occurred. There is a unifying thread to these abductions, and it is through the use of flashback that García Márquez is best able to reveal Escobar's motive. Furthermore, the use of flashback adds more depth to Maruja's story, which is told in present-time and serves as the central focus of the book. By narrating events out of chronological order, García Márquez establishes a dramatic tension within the book that fosters the reader's understanding of Colombian society and politics. Every abduction since the first, that of Diana Turbay and her crew, builds upon the one preceding it, intensifying the drama and suspense. Not until the reader comprehends the final kidnapping in the context of the previous ones can García Márquez begin to explore in depth the Extraditables' demands for amnesty.

Though News of a Kidnapping is written in an unadorned, journalistic style—the sentences tend to be declarative, and there is a marked absence of simile and metaphor otherwise found in García Márquez's novels and short stories—it is not without symbolic power. The author uses symbols sparingly but to great effect in recreating the hostages' experience of captivity. He also uses symbols to reveal traits that are essential for understanding character.

In describing the room in which the three women are held captive, García Márquez selects a few details to create an atmosphere of disorientation. Outside there is the sound of heavy automobile traffic. The women believe they are near a café, for they hear the sound of music very late at night. Occasionally, a loudspeaker announces religious meetings. They hear the sound of small planes landing and taking off, yet the women have no idea where they are. Marina Montoya, the older woman who shares a room with Maruja and Beatriz, espouses theories about what will happen next, arousing fear in her companions. Captivity has heightened the women's senses to the point where they have difficulty distinguishing between truth and fantasy. "At night the silence was total, interrupted only by a demented rooster with no sense of time who crowed whenever he felt like it," García Márquez informs the reader. The women's isolation is complete, for not even the laws of Nature can abide under these conditions.

As their period of captivity lengthens, the women cannot be sure if they are being held in the country or in the city. Once again, García Márquez introduces the rooster as a symbol of disorientation. However, the rooster's crowing at all hours of the day and night also provides a clue about the women's location, "since roosters kept on high floors tend to lose their sense of time.''

Another hostage, Francisco "Pacho" Santos, the editor-in-chief of El Tiempo, experiences a similar phenomenon.

A disorienting detail was the demented rooster that at first crowed at any hour, and as the months passed crowed at the same hour in different places: sometimes far away at three in the afternoon, other times next to his window at two in the morning.

The rooster is again described as "demented," thus emphasizing the absence of reason in a world riddled with doubt and fear, only now its crowing possesses a ubiquitous quality previously non-existent. The rooster can be heard both near and far away. Pacho eventually compounds his despair by attempting to use the rooster's crowing to gauge his position in both time and space. "It would have been even more disorienting if he had known that Maruja and Beatriz also heard it in a distant section of the city," adds García Márquez.

Cock-crow, a symbol for the hour of judgment, is heard often and at various times throughout the day instead of only at dawn. The hostages speculate as to when they will be released—or, what is perhaps foremost in their thoughts: when they will be executed—and the symbolic crowing of a rooster emphasizes the uncertainty and anxiety they experience. The cock crows at random and, in light of Escobar's actions, the release or the deaths of the hostages seems equally as arbitrary. García Márquez sums up this experience by telling the reader that, prior to his release, Pacho spent a sleepless night tormented by the "mad rooster—madder and closer than ever—and not knowing for certain where reality lay."

In addition to using symbol to create an atmosphere of disorientation among the hostages and to reflect their inner states of mind, García Márquez uses symbol to delineate specific character traits. Father García Herreros, a priest and the host of a television program entitled God's Minute, serves as an intermediary between Villamizar, who acts unofficially on behalf of the government, and Pablo Escobar so that negotiations for the release of the hostages may continue. His presence helps Escobar overcome his reluctance in dealing with Villamizar, and it also makes it easier for Escobar's men, many of whom are devoutly religious, to turn themselves in once an agreement has been reached.

Father Herreros is a man of many contrasts. García Márquez describes him as an ascetic who "ate little, though he liked good food and appreciated fine wines, but would not accept invitations to expensive restaurants for fear people would think he was paying." He is an honest, trustworthy man, if slightly misguided by his good intentions. García Márquez draws attention to the fact that Father Herreros wears contact lenses to improve his vision, and that he must have his assistant, Paulina, assist him with putting them in and taking them out, for he has never learned to do so himself.

Many obstacles must be overcome before the remaining hostages are set free, as Escobar's demands change constantly, but throughout the negotiations there is the fear on the part of Villamizar and others that Father Herreros, with his reputation for erratic behavior, will prove a liability and cause the negotiations to end abruptly. This fear proves unfounded, however, for he succeeds in meeting with Escobar and, together, the two men compose a document stating the conditions for the drug lord's surrender. As the priest prepares to leave Escobar's compound, complete with giraffes and hippos wandering about the grounds, one of his contacts falls out. He tries to put it back in but cannot. Escobar, ever the gracious host, offers to have Paulina brought to help him, but the priest refuses. Before he leaves the compound, Father Herreros, his lens not yet restored, says a blessing for Escobar's men.

García Márquez notes the priest's contact lenses in order to underscore his naïveté and lack of foresight in dealing with the narcotraffickers. At a press conference announcing the terms of Escobar's surrender, Father Herreros describes the drug lord as "the great architect of peace.'' He goes on to say that, despite circumstances, "Escobar is a good man.'' How could the priest have forgotten Escobar's violent past? Rather than condemn Father Herreros for his error in judgment, García Márquez focuses instead on Escobar: "No Colombian in history ever possessed or exercised a talent like his for shaping public opinion. And none had a greater power to corrupt."

García Márquez's use of fictional narrative techniques in News of a Kidnapping affords him greater freedom to tell the story of "one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years." By telling the story from the perspectives of several kidnap victims, García Márquez unifies their experience at the same time he offers the reader a broad panorama of the complex personalities and events that make this drama not only an engaging work of journalism but a landmark of literature as well.

Source: David Remy, Critical Essay on News of a Kidnapping, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Remy is a freelance writer who has written extensively on Latin American art and literature.

García Márquez is one of the most famous writers in the world, but not for books like News of a Kidnapping. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize in 1983 and whose novels are read in nearly every language, is associated with a surreal style called "magical realism." News of a Kidnapping, on the other hand, seems to be journalism of the starkest kind. Ten people are kidnapped by soldiers of Pablo Escobar's drug cartel. They are prominent people drawn from the very upper crust of Colombian society. One is the daughter of a former President; another is a famous former soap-opera actress with high political family connections; others are prominent journalists. They are kept under armed guard for six months, and there is every reason to think they will be killed. Eventually, all are released and survive, except for two. García Márquez describes their ordeal, and that of their friends and families, in a book that joins Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood on the short shelf of masterpieces that define crime journalism and the novelist's art.

But News of a Kidnapping is not merely a journalistic account of some kidnappings; it is a novel (of sorts), and one not as far removed from the author's trademark "magic realism" as it might seem. Because García Márquez was originally a journalist, and has spent much of his adult life in the journalistic world, he knows a lot about how news is written. As a result, News of a Kidnapping is written with a very level, factual-sounding tone that suggests the most orderly and observant kind of reporting. Even the title suggests journalism.

In fact, the book is written with an artfulness that conceals as much as it tells. For example, García Márquez tells us in his introduction that the book's genesis came in 1993, when "Maruja Pachon and her husband, Alberto Villamizar, suggested I write a book about her abduction and six-month captivity, and his persistent efforts to win her release." García Márquez tells us that he realized immediately that the story could not be told without also telling the story of the other nine people who were kidnapped simultaneously by Escobar's forces, for the purpose of persuading the government not to extradite them to the United States. Pachon and Villamizar, though, would be "the central axis, the unifying thread, of this book.''

What do we learn from reading this introduction? Because García Márquez is so skilled a writer, it behooves a reader to pay close attention to what he or she is being told. The book is gripping, and it's easy to get lost in the story. But consider that first sentence of the introduction: "In October 1993, Maruja Pachon and her husband, Alberto Villamizar, suggested I write a book." There are several facts, just below the surface, that readers would do well to bear in mind as they read. (There will be others later; and other facts readers won't be told.)

One fact readers can gather if they look closely lie in the couple's names. While it is fairly common in America for wives to keep their names, it is far less so in a Roman Catholic country like Columbia. And in fact, nearly all of the major characters in News of a Kidnapping are elite professionals, members of a wealthy class at the very topmost level of Colombian society. Readers hear of the "ghetto boys" who guard the hostages, and war against the police, but hear very little else about them, such as why they are so willing to die for Escobar, or why the police kill them indiscriminately in the Medellín ghettos.

This is not to say that News of a Kidnapping is somehow flawed because it is not a sociological treatise on all levels of Colombian society. On the contrary, as an artist, García Márquez isn't obliged to tell us anything he does not think will further his purposes. But insofar as News of a Kidnapping presents itself as more-or-less transparent journalism, readers are obliged to think about what they aren't reading.

Beyond his choice of subjects, García Márquez displays supreme literary craftsmanship in his mastery of time and space. Many of his greatest novels, including his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, follow many characters over long periods of time. News of a Kidnapping would seem to be an exception, but actually the cross-cutting, multiple perspectives, and meticulous editing would do great credit to movie directors Stephen Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Readers hardly notice at times as they move from one hostage cell to another, and thence to the office of President Gaviria, and from there to the shadowy settings in which Pablo Escobar moves.

García Márquez also has the novelist's gift for finding the perfect detail, and weaving it into his story. Marina Montoya, the former actress, even under the severest physical and psychological distress, takes care to keep her nails trimmed and painted. It's a poignant and revealing detail, and it makes this woman more real to us, rather than just a "damsel in distress" or faceless victim. When Marina is summoned to what she knows is her imminent murder, she takes special care to make up her face and do her nails. When her body is found, it is unrecognizable at first, because her killers have shot her through the face; but she is eventually identified by her beautiful nails. This is a heart-rending detail, and it simultaneously gives readers an emotional purchase on Marina's death, as well as giving the story the ring of truth. And it is easy to overlook the groundwork that García Márquez has done earlier in the book, preparing us for this moment with his numerous references to Marina and her manicures. As García Márquez told a journalism seminar in 1996, "one must keep the reader hypnotized by tending to every detail, every word. . . . It is a continuous act where you poison the reader with credibility and with rhythm."

As a result of this kind of literary art, readers feel that by the time they are done reading the book they have gained a deep and varied understanding of the complexion of Colombia. They have been high and low, inside the minds of men and women, young people and old, and felt the tension of so many different desperate interests clashing over the fates of the hostages. The upshot is that readers walk away from News of a Kidnapping feeling that what they have read represents not just the truth about Colombia, but beyond that some kind of universal human truth. The author, after all, is a great novelist, and has done his level best not to present the kidnappings as a melodrama. The book is dedicated to "all Colombians, guilty and innocent."

It is here where readers would do well to bear in mind the technique of magic realism. With magic realism, supernatural events are thought of as normal—the appearance of an angel, say, or a man levitating off the ground—and treated in precisely the same detailed, matter-of-fact tone that is used in News of a Kidnapping. Magic realism isn't effective because amazing things happen; it's effective because those things are woven seamlessly into the texture of everyday life. When people read of two defenseless women being abducted, or of armed captors having a party for their hostages, and even becoming close to them, in one way it seems unimaginable, surreal; but García Márquez never lets any event become too amazing.

One side effect of this style, however, is a certain flattening. Because everything is described in such a concrete, detailed, and prosaic way, we tend to lose sight of everything beyond the frame of what readers are being shown and told. García Márquez means for this to happen; but that doesn't necessarily mean that readers need to be unaware of it. News of a Kidnapping is a masterpiece; but a masterpiece closer to fiction than to reportage.

Source: Josh Ozersky, Critical Essay on News of a Kidnapping, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Ozersky is a critic and essayist.