Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa carried on one the longest and most complicated literary feuds in the history of letters. So what really happened between them?

… Indeed, it is true that García Márquez—whose most renowned works are No One Writes to the Colonel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and the most commercially successful novel in Spanish since [Miguel de Cervantes'] Don Quixote, the ten million-selling One Hundred Years of Solitude—is an unreconstructed left-winger. His very erstwhile friend, Vargas Llosa, apostatised from his youthful love of Fidel Castro many years back and has since stood as a right-wing candidate in an unsuccessful attempt to become president of Peru. But, while their political views diverged widely, that was not thought to be the cause of the row.

Others have speculated that professional jealousy lay beneath the blow that sparked the feud. Vargas Llosa is the author of The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. But, though he is credited with being—along with García Márquez—one of the pioneers of magic realism, his works are not in the same league as his rival’s. One Hundred Years of Solitude is widely regarded as a defining classic of twentieth-century literature, and García Márquez is believed by many to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

Yet it was not authorial rivalry that began the thirty-one-year-long icy feud. No; according to a new biography of García Márquez, The Journey to the Seed by Dasso Saldivar, the two were fighting over a woman. And though García Márquez is eighty this month, and Vargas Llosa is now seventy, the animosity has not diminished.

They were fighting over a woman? A woman? Actually, the story is more complex than that, one fraught with sex, violence, and politics. It’s too good to pass up.

(Update: Hilarious.)