MAGIC FORMULA
No writer is entirely sui generis, notes Salman Rushdie. Someone said of his first “and now justly obscure” novel, Grimus, that he had obviously been influenced by the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. This was 1975 and he’d not heard the name, he swears.
Since then, he has read Garcia Márquez and pretty much everybody else, and , which gathers his essays, speeches and commencement addresses of the past two decades, is about, at least in part, his admiration of and influence of literature’s masters. While his first nonfiction collection, 2002’s , spoke of Jorge
