Sometimes a Bad Blurb is Worse Than No Blurb

I looked down today and noticed this:

"One of a glittering constellation of contemporary Latin American novelists...He is the author of a classic on the grandest scale...the most obvious comparison is with Homer's Odyssey..."

Did this reviewer read another book and then accidentally submitted this as a blurb for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Year of Solitude? The Odyssey? Most obvious? I thought that title would be forever held by James Joyce, for Ulysses.

Who writes these things anyways...one of a glittering. When this book was first published in 1967, it was a revelation. GGM didn't win the NP4L because he was one of many Latin American writers, he won it because he was the Latin American writer. He created a new genre. Yes South America has given up Coelho, Borges, Neruda and others, but when you think of magical realism, do you think of anyone other than GGM?

Phrases like, "references Homer", "parallels the Odyssey", etc would have made sense. This blurb writer seems like he didn't bother to even read the book. It sounds like the opening paragraph of a paper you had to write for a book you didn't even bother to get Cliff Notes for or rent the movie or read.

Now here is a real blurb.

Reality and fantasy are indistinguishable: a Spanish galleon beached in the jungle, a flying carpet, a cloud of yellow flowers, an iguana in a woman's womb, are more than guerilla coups, banana company massacres, and the coming of the steam-engine...As an experience it is enormously, kaleidoscopically, mysteriously alive...

Wow.