Tossup

In this novella, a “wizard with four buttons” disappears five years after writing, “Are you frightened?” on the back of a movie program, his only “love letter” to his fiancée. A yellow-eyed foreigner who requests grass at a banquet begins an affair with the Guajiro (“gwah-HEE-roh”) maid Meme (“MAY-may”) in this novella. An epigraph from Antigone precedes a possibly gay ten-year-old confiding, “I’ve seen a corpse for the first time” at this novella’s start, as his mother worries about keeping a promise to an outcast who hung himself decades after refusing to treat shot rebels. Isabel’s father, a colonel, prepares to bury a despised doctor in this novella, whose title is a metaphor for a banana company’s (10[1])arrival. For 10 points, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was published in a collection titled for what Gabriel García Márquez novella that introduced Macondo? ■END■

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