The insomnia plague: a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story

"All the great writers have good eyes" is a sentence by V. Nabokov that is very suitable for G.G. Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude. The n ovel, published in 1967, introduces among many others, the character of lit tle Rebeca, whose frailness and greenish skin revealed hunger "that was old er than she was". The girl, because of a pica syndrome, only liked to eat e arth and the cake of whitewash. But her fate appears to be determined by th e lethal insomnia plague, whose most fearsome part was not the impossibilit y of sleeping but its inexorable evolution toward a loss of memory in which the sick person "sinks into a kind of idiocy that had no past". Rebeca's l ethal insomnia looks quite similar to the "peculiar, fatal disorder of slee p" originally described by Lugaresi et al. in 1986. One Hundred Years of So litude shows that G.G. Marquez was gifted not only with good eyes, but has the seductive power of changing reality into fantasy, while transforming hi s visions into reality.