In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters. Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember the day his father took him to discover the ice.
Gabriel García Márquez, it is said — though Gerald Martin, as a respectable Anglo-Saxon mythbusting biographer, disputes the version of the story — promptly braked the car and drove back to Mexico City, where he sat down at a typewriter and did not get up until his great novel was finished.
Legends coagulated around One Hundred Years of Solitude even before it was finished, from its celebrated first sentence onwards. People were describing it as a great novel when they had seen only its first 80 pages. It was a famous work long before its publication, as García Márquez gave a reading to a spellbound audience in Mexico City. Once it was published — García Márquez’s wife, Mercedes, had to pawn her hairdryer and liquidiser to pay the postage, standing by her husband as it went off like, Martin says, ‘two survivors of a catastrophe’ — it quickly took over the world. Few people who read it at the time, and very few since, have been immune to its overpowering, torrential imaginative force. Whether its influence on world literature has been benign is a different question; many novelists have been immensely impressed by the apparition of the wrecked galleon in the jungle, overgrown with lush orchids, and tried to reproduce the effect, with limp results. It could only really be done, we might now conclude, by García Márquez.
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Anthony Hopkins
October 25th, 2008 10:39pmMany have sat at the feet of Garcia Marquez, including our very own Salman Rushdie, whose "Midnight's Children" I read (perhaps unfortunately), just after I had completed the first two thirds of Garcia's Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and which I soon put down as a poor attempt to reproduce the work of the Master.
I have also attempted to read Garcia's later novels but they also pale in comparison with "Cien Anos". I did, however, manage to complete an earlier work, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold".
The olny writer to my knowledge who has successfully managed to write saomething comparable to "Cien Anos" is Isabelle Allende, whose "House of the Spirts" is a wonderful mixture of magical realism and Chilean History which I have read and enjoyed three times.
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T. Gonzalez
October 24th, 2008 5:42pmGabriel Garcia Marquez....much ado about nothing.
How much of the obeisance rendered to this author is product of our sheep mentality, a malaise that is smothering all of the arts from musical to literary.
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Malcolm Deas
October 24th, 2008 9:47amPedants' corner: a liquiliqui is not a garment worn by the Colombian proletariat. It is the - fairly formal - tropical jacket that used to be worn by worn by Venezuelan hacendados, perhaps of Durch colonial origin, via Curacao. It is not worn by Colombians. A famous liquiliqui wearer was the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gomez; legend has it that he had them made in Savile Row.
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