Buying Greenland? That's Nothing To Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez's intricate, confusing, magnificent novel centers around a monstrous, nameless dictator — known only as the General or the Patriarch — who sells the entire Caribbean Sea.
When President Donald Trump declared that he wanted to buy Greenland, reactions turned swiftly from hilarity — he can't be serious — to appalled embarrassment when it became clear that he was.
In the midst of it all, one could hear the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez chuckle.
Gabo, as the late great Colombian writer was known, wouldn't have been in the least startled by the U.S. President's sense of entitlement. On the contrary, buying an island nation would come across as rather tame compared to the audacious real estate transaction that takes place in his 1975 novel, where the United States buys the Caribbean Sea from a tinpot tyrant and ships it off to Arizona, leaving behind an enormous crater of dust.
