VIII. Canada and Its Americas: Transnational and Transcultural Navigations of the Literary

Abstract

I “All the buses to Aracataca were brightly colored”, Michael Ondaatje recalls in a 1978 essay on Gabriel García Márquez that he addresses to fellow Canadian writer Sheila Watson. Ondaatje writes that the vehicles en route to Márquez’s home town “would take a side road down into the river and soak in it like animals” and notes that he has “terrific slides of the pigs and of the men delivering ice at Aracataca”. Yet he finds himself wondering, “What am I doing in this South American town [...]..