A legend in his own lifetime

BORN on March 6, 1928, Colombian novelist and short story writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a leading figure of the renaissance of Latin American literature that began in the 1960s. Born in abject poverty, and brought up by his grandparents, in a remote village in north Colombia, he nevertheless, studied law and journalism. He followed a journalistic career from 1948 and began to write short stories which were published in the volume Eyes of a Boue Dog in 1947 but went unnoticed. In 1955 came another collection Leaf Storm. In the title story he created the fictional backward town of Macondo in intricate fiction, loosely based on his birthplace, that mixed elements of the fantastic with social realism, which appears throughout his work as a symbolic focus of Colombian history and identity. The stories in Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel (1985) were preludes to his novels, the first of which was In Evil Hour in 1962, followed by Big Man's Funeral. Owing to his left-wing sympathies and a strong friendship with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Garcia Marquez came into disfavour with the Colombian government and spent the 60s and 70s in voluntary exile, in Spain and mainly in Mexico. In 1967 he produced his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude — an exceptional work tracing the history and ethos of Macondo through the lives of several generations of its leading family. The book is celebrated for its 'magic realism', an intermingling of realism and fantasy that has been much imitated in recent writing. Innocent Ernendira and Other Stories followed in 1972. In 1975 came The Autumn of the Patriarch, a strange, complex, and a haunting satire portraying a tyrant who sells out to imperialist interest. Then followed the novella Chronicle of a Death (Foretold (1981), a murder tale which critics called a classic of that genre, which investigates why two young men carry out a murder they did not want to commit. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor came in 1982, Live in the Time of Cholera (1985), Clandestine Adventures in Chile (1986), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and his latest News of a Kidnapping (1996) — all without exception big international best-sellers. One of the highest selling authors in the world, Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

WHEN we in India think of Latin America, places such as Ultima in Esperanza (Last Hope), Golfs de Penas (Gulf of Sorrows), Puerto Hamboe (Port Hunger), Isla Desolacion (Desolation Island) and Bahia Inutil (Useless Bay) are not locations that normally come to mind. They seem to be fictional names or places devoid of any sign of life. In reality, life flourishes in them with more force than in many other regions of the world. It is a strange world, an unreal reality that combines the most concrete elements of existence with a magic and fantasy. It is a region in which man communes with nature, while trying to survive within, or in spite of it. It is a region where there is still a rich, profound life, one in which mankind looks for, and often finds — even without looking — his primitive roots.

It is a region made of labyrinths of islands and channels, floating and submerged icebergs, plants and birds seen nowhere else, where the Andes mountain chain lowers its shoulders and breaks up into thousands of little pieces at the end of the world. It is a region whose very heart is brought to us through its literature — a literature that is vibrant and youthful, long and wide, high and deep; a literature that shines through all the trends of the world's literary scene. And, above all, it is a region where the real, daily events are often magical, beyond our own realities, because they occur in such a strange land, inhabited by lone and rare beings with unusual name. And one such unusual names which today dominates the world literary scene is that of 70-year-old writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez — a novelist familiar even to those who have never read him.

Garcia Marquez, more than any other writer in the world, combines both respect and mass popularity, bordering on adulation. And it all started with his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude — a modern classic, a handbook of an entire continent. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the unlikely tale of five generations of a single South American family. They are visited by civil wars and by progress in many of its least manageable forms, and they die out in an apocalyptic storm which destroys both their town and their story — except for what a young writer in Paris remembers or invents of its. The novel, in fact, belatedly provides the first page of Latin American narrative as a whole:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon where his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty Adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like pre-historic eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point one's figure."

Could anything be clearer?

Garcia Marquez is as good at closing a novel down as he is at discovering beginnings:

Only then did he discover that Amaranta Ursula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha solely so that they could search for one another through the most intricate labyrinths of blood, until they engendered the mythological animal which could put an end to their family line. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliono skipped eleven pages so as not to waste time on facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the moment he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror...But before he reached the final line he had realized that he would never leave that room, for it was ordained that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be swept away by the wind and exiled from the memory of men in the instant when Aureliano finished deciphering the parchments, and that everything that was written in them was unrepeatable for always and forever, because those races condemned to one hundred years of solitude would have no second chance on earth.

The great power of this modern classic lies in its mingling of the fabulous (magic carpets, a levitating priest, a man who suddenly spouts Latin without having learned a word of it) and the horrific (the massacre of more than three thousand protestors, who became historical ghosts because almost no one will admit they existed); and in its haunting sense of a potentially intelligible but always misunderstood history. In many a sense, it is an extraordinary novel — a work of obsessional originality. For me, a great book is one which you can go back to anytime and yet the rewards are dazzling. Well, this certainly is a great book. No wonder critics claim it to be the quintessential Latin Amercian novel of the century.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was written in an 18-month-long burst of sustained creativity. Garcia Marquez was stunned when his publisher told him that he was going in for a print run of 8000 copies which, he was confident, would sell out in about ten months, in comparison to 700 copies of his previous four books. He was further shocked when the book sold but in 10 days, and soon the fame of the novel spread across frontiers and languages, and he was precipitated from scratching a living as a journalist to worldwide literary fame. The book has already sold well over 25 million copies, influenced two generations of writers, and judged as one novel of our time that will survive on the bookshelf for generaions to come. And with it Garcia Marquez became a living legend of his own life time.

A long-awaited and much-talked about novel from Garcia Marquez was Love in the Time of Cholera. While many a critic "found it hard to believe that Garcia Marquez could have written an even better novel than One Hundred Yeas of Solitude, what surprised others was that it turned out to be "a sort of soap opera", in which a near geriatric couple wait for a whole lifetime to come together and consummate their love.

It's a very powerful and poetic long-distance love story. For 50 years a breath-taking beauty, now old and just widowed, Fermina Daza has recoiled in pride and guilt from her secret lover. His desolate obsession has led him into an enigmatic existence inspite of his great success in business.

According to academician Michael Wood, the book's irony is so poker-faced that one wonders whether it is irony at all. But Garcia Marquez has understood, better than anyone, the intelligence of popular fiction and the way in which it animates what look like banalities. The novel is an invitation to see what genuine wit can do with threadbare romantic material. Towards the end, the woman finds herself wondering why she has never heard of any sexual conquests made by the man, and questions him about it. This is a mushy opportunity too good to be missed. He replies, "It's because I remained a virgin for you." This is not true, he has had hundreds of women; what is unusual is that no one has heard about it. The woman does not in fact believe him, but neither does she care. He rises to the sentimental occasion of talking like a bad novel; and she knows how to respond," she wouldn't have believed him anyway even if it were true, because his love letters were made up of phrases like that one, that were effective, not through their meaning but through their power of dazzlement . But she liked the spirit with which he said it." This woman is not highly educated nor literary, but she knows where the literal meaning needs to be abandoned or ignored. She has escaped from the imprisonment of cliche because she has seen the work that cliches can do.

What makes it a "good" book is that it is rich and brilliant with emotion. Moreover, it brings everything close — the disabling heat, the pressure of the sea, the storms, the great coastal swamps, the civil wars and much more. It suggests that true love is not blind, but sees all the faults and does not mind.

Love in the Time of Cholera is "an anatomy of love in all its forms. And it's other great subject is time — how memory transfigures and redeems all that has gone before...how the extraordinary is contained in the ordinary....Result is a novel whose narrative power is matched only by its generosity of vision." As a critic said, "it is a novel in praise of spontaneity, sexual passion, disorder and vitality, a triumph of the uncertain, sprawling confusion of life over the comforting, dull precision of authority, a victory of the indigenous over the imported, old age over death, the popular over the learned."

(To be continued)