Thin in every sense

… Posthumous publication: Honoring an author’s wishes or literary grave robbing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Novels in translation are often prey for the whims of quixotic or plain bad writing, but lines such as “his whole being radiated a distinctive air through his fresh eau de cologne” are not just bathetic but suggest that either the book’s translator Anne McLean was not up to the job or, more likely, Márquez’s existing work was so poor that even the most talented interpreter would be unable to make headway with its incomprehensibilities and banalities.