Frances Wilson

The gifts of Gabo

Once he started consorting with presidents and dictators, the Nobel Prize-winner became laughably self-important, according to many of his friends

Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and 300 interviews, including one with Fidel Castro. So what does Solitude & Company add to the fairytale history of ‘Gabo’, as Latin America’s greatest teller of historical fairy tales is generally known?

In the year 2000, when García Márquez was still alive, Silvana Paternostro began conducting her own interviews with Gabo’s family, his ‘first and last friends’, his agents, editors and fellow writers. She has now cut, spliced and transcribed the tapes in order to create the effect of a bar full of drunks interrupting one another. ‘Is that tape recorder off?’, asks Quique Scopell, a photographer. ‘Leave it on!’

The model for the book is George Plimpton’s Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall his Turbulent Career, and García Márquez is as suited to the vox-pop treatment as Capote was. What is grandly called oral history and otherwise known as gossip (‘This isn’t for you to repeat,’ confides one of the revellers) was described by García Márquez himself as ‘fiction about fiction’; and it becomes clear, once you get to know his muckers, where Gabo got his gift of the gabo.

He comes from a culture in which everyone tells stories or, as Quique puts it, ‘talks shit’. One of Gabo’s oldest friends goes off on a riff about another friend who kept a pet cricket called Fififififi — ‘listen, this is true!’ — who told his master one day that he had made his lunch: ‘Maestro, maestro, I prepared something for you’, at which point maestro put Fififififi into his mouth and swallowed him.

Solitude & Company divides into two parts. The first tells the story, through Gabo’s siblings and early ‘arguers’, of how the youngest of 12 children, born in 1927 to what a distant cousin described as a family of witches, was raised by his grandparents in Aracataca, which sounds suspiciously like Abracadabra and became, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the magical town of Macondo.

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