Reading About Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 I credit Gabriel Garcia Marquez with giving me the idea that kept me going when I got to prison: lucidity. There had to be something besides mere sobriety, and Marquez gave me the word I had been needing. This came to me while reading Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I knew of Márquez without ever reading him. When I did read him, I saw a different way of approaching fiction. The Atlantic's How One Hundred Years of Solitude Became a Classic captures someof my own reaction:

Between 1967 and 1969, reviewers argued that One Hundred Years of Solitude overcame the limitations of these styles. Contrary to the localism of indigenismo, reviewers saw One Hundred Years of Solitude as a cosmopolitan story, one that “could correct the path of the modern novel,” according to the Latin American literary critic Ángel Rama. Unlike the succinct language of social realism, the prose of García Márquez was an “atmospheric purifier,” full of poetic and flamboyant language, as the Spanish writer Luis Izquierdo argued. And contrary to the formal experiments of the nouveau roman, his novel returned to “the narrative of imagination,” as the Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer explained. Upon the book’s translation to major languages, international reviewers acknowledged this, too. The Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg forcefully called One Hundred Years of Solitude “an alive novel,” assuaging contemporary fears that the form was in crisis.

And yet these and other reviewers also remarked that One Hundred Years of Solitude was not a revolutionary work, but an anachronistic and traditionalist one, whose opening sentence resembled the “Once upon a time” formula of folk tales. And rather than a serious novel, it was a “comic masterpiece,” as an anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote in 1967. Early views on this novel were indeed different from the ones that followed. In 1989, Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom solemnly called it “the new Don Quixote” and the writer Francine Prose confessed in 2013 that “One Hundred Years of Solitude convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school.”  

Nowadays scholars, critics, and general readers mainly praise the novel as “the best expression of magical realism.” By 1995, magical realism was seen as making its way into the works of major English-language authors such John Updike and Salman Rushdie and moreover presented as “an inextricable, ineluctable element of human existence,” according to the New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani. But in 1967, the term magical realism was uncommon, even in scholarly circles. During One Hundred Years of Solitude’s first decade or so, to make sense of this “unclassifiable work,” as a reviewer put it, readers opted for labeling it as a mixture of “fantasy and reality,” “a realist novel full of imagination,” “a curious case of mythical realism,” “suprarrealism,”or, as a critic for Le Monde called it, “the marvelous symbolic.”

Uh, huh. It is all of that. Thank you, JC for telling me to read Marquez.

The Paris Review has opened Solitude & Company: An Oral Biography of Gabriel García Márquez to the public. Here is a passage that caught my attention:

GUILLERMO ANGULO: His greatest inspiration was his grandmother. One of his relatives was combing his hair, and his grandmother warned him not to comb his hair at night because it would cause a ship to be lost at sea.

RAFAEL ULLOA: I think that his greatness lies in his imagination. An imagination with which he reveals things to the world that appear to be improbable, but people like them. It’s the way he puts them. A metallic grasshopper, for example, that leaps from town to town along the banks of the Magdalena River. Connecting technology with grasshoppers. Gabo has some marvelous ways about him. Not long ago I was talking with some friends and we were reminiscing about the paid mourners. These are women brought to wail and weep for the dead. Gabo remembered one called Pachita Pérez, who was the champion of all the mourners. He says that she was so powerful a mourner that she could sum up the corpse’s life in one shriek.

Read the books, it will be a good thing.

sch  8/28/22