Children of Scheherazade: Gabriel García Márquez in Arabic

Chapter 3 examines direct reworkings of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels in Arabic literature. The chapter focuses on the Arabisation of the genre of magical realism and a rewriting of a Latin American novel by comparing two sets of novels from the second half of the twentieth century: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and Layālī alf layla (Arabian Nights and Days, 1982) by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb Maḥfūẓ); and García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Elias Khoury’s Majma‘ al-asrār (The Assembly of Secrets, 1994). This chapter discusses the ways in which Mahfouz’s Layālī alf layla, a modern Arab adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights, reworks the style of magical realism popularised by García Márquez in his masterwork Cien años de soledad and Khoury’s reworking of García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada in Majma‘ al-asrār. The intertextuality in Khoury’s novel contributes to connections between Latin America and the Arab world. While Mahfouz’s Arabisation of magical realism and Khoury’s Lebanese Civil War novel focus on local contexts, they show engagements with Latin American literature and foreground shared political struggles.