NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING.

By Gabriel García Márquez. Edith Grossman, trans. Knopf. 304 pp. $25

On a secluded ranch dotted with African wildlife, a Colombian drug lord orchestrates the abduction of 10 leading journalists and political figures. The drug lord, Pablo Escobar, declares that he will release these hostages only if he is tried for narcotics crimes in his native land and not extradited to the United States for trial. "Better a grave in Colombia," he avows, "than a jail in the United States." The Colombian government at first refuses to bend. After two of the prisoners are murdered, though, the government bars Escobar’s extradition, and the remaining hostages are released.

In recounting these events of 1990, Nobel laureate García Márquez returns to journalism, a profession he left to take up fiction some 35 years ago. While stripping his prose of the exotic flourishes that mark such novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), he nonetheless provides a striking portrait, grim but hopeful, of a nation in crisis. His book reminds us that democracy can be fragile but never futile.

News of a Kidnapping is a deeply personal account that pays tribute to the author’s friends Maruja Pachón, one of the people kidnapped by Escobar’s men, and her husband, Alberto Villamizar, an influential politician who personally lobbied both President César Gaviria and Escobar for release of the hostages (including his sister and his wife). Villamizar and Pachón persuaded García Márquez to write the book, and the two of them appear as central characters. "Their pain, their patience, and their rage," the author notes, "gave me the courage to persist in this autumnal task, the saddest and most difficult of my life."

To García Márquez, the government’s extradition policy was a mistake from the outset. "No mother would send her children to be punished at the neighbor’s house," he told an interviewer last year. In News of a Kidnapping, he suggests that the tragedy could have been avoided if the government had abandoned the policy more readily. His argument is convincing to a degree, but only because he neglects to take note of the cycle of violence and death that has terrorized Colombia for much of this century. This shortcoming is an act of omission, not one of ignorance, for García Márquez is acutely aware of the perilous state of affairs in his native land. Still, he remains optimistic. "News of a kidnapping, no matter how painful," he observes, "is not as irremediable as news of a murder."

—David Brindley