Gabriel Garcia Marquez Almost Makes Prison Worthwhile - 9/25/2014

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order.. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/15/2025] 

Why I did not read Gabriel Garcia Marquez before prison is a question I ask of myself quite often. Truthfully, the question also applies to Cormac McCarthy. I knew of both, but chose not to read them. I can say novel reading never me as much as history or biography. My disinterest only increased after giving up any plans for writing. See, Marquez makes me want to write.

I finished Collected Novellas (Harper Perennials, 1999) yesterday. Marquez begins the fifth chapter of "A Death Foretold" with this paragraph:

For years we couldn't talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance event sthat had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren't doing it from an urge to clean up mysteries but because none us could go on living without a exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.

 Gabriel Garcia Marquez inverts the chronology of a murder in "A Death Foretold" like Tarantino in did in Pulp Fiction. Except Marquez does this in a more complex manner, told in an off-hand way, so that the technique beguiles rather than startles.

In the opening novella, "Leaf Story," Marquez tells the story of an unknown stranger's life during the time waiting on the burial order for the man's body. Three interwoven points of view - grandson, daughter, and grandfather. While also telling most obliquely the effects of bananas on the town's economy. I admit I like the oblique effect. It is precisely this obliqueness, telling more than one story at a time, I want for my "Only the Dead and the Dying" stories.

What makes Marquez inspiring to me is how he makes me interested in people and life.

Love in the Time of Cholera still lies ahead of me. I think that exhausts the prison's collection of Marquez's books. Meanwhile, I put Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day on the list as a substitute for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Back to writing "Mike Devlin's Homecoming" tomorrow.

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