Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the greatest of the amnesia writers

Abstract

Garcia Marquez's descriptions of memory loss came largely from his observations of several family members suffering with Alzheimer's dementia. His account of 'the loss of the name and notion of things' in One Hundred Years of Solitude preceded the notion of semantic dementia, while his descriptions of amnesia in The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in his Labyrinth can now be looked upon as literary prodromes. Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time explores the way particular events are re-ignited in our memories, whereas Marquez teaches us more about the benefits and disadvantages of forgetting.