Salman Rushdie on Gabriel Garcia Marquez

without our even having to stretch out our arms, the flood of books
spilled out of the print room and knocked down the first arrivals at
the presses, who succumbed deliriously to that terrible deluge of
narrative as it covered the streets and the sidewalks and rose lap-high
in the ground-floor rooms of all the houses for miles around, so that
there was no one who could escape from that story, if you were blind or
shut your eyes it did you no good because there were always voices
reading aloud within earshot, we had all been ravished like willing
virgins by that tale, which had the quality of convincing each reader
that it was his personal autobiography; and then the book filled up our
country and headed out to sea, and we understood in the insanity of our
possession that the phenomenon would not cease until the entire surface
of the globe had been covered, until seas, mountains, underground
railways and deserts had been completely clogged up by the endless
copies emerging from the bewitched printing press, with the exception,
as Melquiades the gypsy told us, of a single northern country called
Britain whose inhabitants had long ago become immune to the book
disease, no matter how virulent the strain….