Garbiel Garcia Marquez won't publish the second volume of his memoirs because of some bad relationships, says Madrid correspondent Giles Tremlett in The Guardian.

García Marquez, who published a first volume of memoirs four years ago, is resisting writing a second volume, reportedly because he does not want to go into the reasons behind that fight. "I have realised that if I write the second volume, I will have to tell things that I do not want to tell about certain personal relationships that are not at all good," he said in an interview with Spain's La Vanguardia newspaper last year.

This came to light because one of those bad relationships has recovered some amicability. Apparently, Mario Vargas Llosa is to contribute a prologue to a planned second edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. "The agreement comes despite the fact the two have not spoken since they came to blows in a Mexican cinema in 1976."

But it is also reported that the prologue will be taken from a "laudatory" book that Vargas Llosa wrote about Marquez in 1971. So it's not actually new material. It will, however, be new to many readers, especially those living outside the Latin American ambit.

Maybe now that this particular relationship has recovered some proper balance, Marquez will be freed to write the second, much-anticipated volume of memoirs. The first volume ends, readers will remember, when he departs Columbia for Switzerland in, I think, 1954.

Thanks to The Literary Saloon for the heads up.