News of a Kidnapping.

Like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez can sit wherever he pleases, even if this means abandoning the field of Latin American fiction he has dominated since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. So when he decided, as a personal favor to one of the victims, to write a nonfictional account of a series of drug-trafficking-related kidnappings in his native Colombia in 1990, there could be no doubt that his endeavor would find its way into print.

Unfortunately, neither the substantive content nor the literary qualities of News of a Kidnapping come near matching the dimensions of his generous impulse. The book takes as its subject an episode that will scarcely rate as a blip on the radar screen of Colombia's recent history. Moreover, the author's terse style recalls his early career as a journalist, and reflects a conscious choice to let the hostages tell their own stories without impressing upon them the stamp of the Garcia Marquez imagination. (It is as though we were witnessing future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux work on the mound in a slow-pitch softball game.)

The narrative recounts how agents working for the country's most notorious drug dealer, Pablo Escobar, snatched nine Colombians and one German in four discreet operations between late August and early November of 1990, and held them as bargaining chips in negotiations between the authorities and the traffickers, with the latter doggedly determined to avoid the possibility of extradition to the United States. The Colombian government sought the peaceful surrender of the narco-kingpins, who in turn demanded assurances that they would serve prison terms in Colombia and that they and their families would be protected from violent reprisals.

Perhaps the most glaring weakness of the book is its failure to put these events in a perspective that would render them more comprehensible to readers unfamiliar with Colombia's tortured history. Garcia Marquez was obviously writing for his compatriots, which makes inexcusable the failure of his American publisher to provide background information, a simple chronology, or even an index.

The state of near anarchy giving rise to the events described in News of a Kidnapping forms part of a complex layering of turbulence that has enveloped Colombia over the past half century. A political assassination in 1948 triggered an orgy of killing that lasted for more than a decade and claimed more lives than the American Civil War. This tragic convulsion, known simply as "La Violencia" ("The Violence"), combined undeclared warfare between the nation's two major political parties with blood feuds in the isolated communities of the mountainous interior, as well as with unvarnished banditry.

Just when some sort of peace was returning to Colombia, various Cuban-inspired guerrilla groups launched a series of bloody offensives, which in turn provoked extreme brutality on the part of security forces bent on annihilating them without regard for basic human rights.

The curse of violence then took a new and even deadlier turn as a result of the success of the nation's powerful cocaine-trafficking cartels that built an industry generating billions of dollars in income and spreading the rot of corruption throughout Colombian society. The narcotics peddlers resisted government efforts to eliminate them by murdering public officials, political candidates, judges, journalists, and innocent bystanders.

Garcia Marquez makes fleeting references to this historical context. However, readers looking for a more comprehensive treatment should consult Alma Guillermoprieto's brilliant chapter on Colombia in her book, The Heart that Bleeds.

The aftermath of the kidnappings demonstrates their relative insignificance in the broader scheme of things. Pablo Escobar did in fact eventually order the release of eight of the hostages (one was executed and another killed in a shootout when the police stumbled upon the neighborhood where she was being held). Escobar gave himself up and was confined in a specially constructed prison which had many of the characteristics of a country club and from which he casually strolled, an escape made possible by some well-placed bribes. The police subsequently tracked him down and killed him. Yet the cocaine trade continues to flourish, and recent reports of payments made by the drug traffickers to Colombian legislators (and allegedly even to the president) demonstrate the deep roots of lawlessness in the country.

Garcia Marquez presents a somewhat muted portrait of Escobar, whose larger-than-life qualities would seem to have been perfect grist for the author's literary talents. One wonders, for example, what flights of fantasy he might have constructed from the following minimalist passage he tossed off in News of a Kidnapping: "Politicians, industrialists, businesspeople, journalists, even ordinary freeloaders, came to the perpetual party ... where Pablo Escobar kept a zoo with giraffes and hippos brought over from Africa, and where the entrance displayed, as if it were a national monument, the small plane used to export the first shipment of cocaine."

Indeed, the part of the narrative that comes closest to the wizardry for which Garcia Marquez is best known describes Escobar's bizarre surrender, apparently provoked by an appeal from a saintly eighty-two-year-old cleric whose long-running evening sermonettes ("God's Minute") reached a wide radio audience despite their tendency to lapse into total incomprehensibility. The priest took it upon himself to act as mediator between Escobar and the government, and made personal contact with the trafficker, who thereupon released the hostages and presented himself to the authorities.

News of a Kidnapping displays occasional deft touches, but on the whole it is a minor work by a major talent.

Joseph A. Page, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of The Brazilians and Peron: A Biography.