Guruprasad Nagarajan's Blog - Posts Tagged "magical-realism"

I almost always get drawn in by the first line of a book before buying it, and Marquez’ masterpiece was one such book I was lured into by the opening lines. There is something melancholic, beautiful, engaging, mysterious and irresistible about those first few lines. I had attempted reading him earlier, about ten years ago, but I landed on the wrong book, the Autumn of the Patriarch, which, if I remember right, did not have full stops for pages on end. All authors have their entry point books I think, (for instance, if you want to start off with Murakami don’t let Kafka on the Shore be your first as it was with me before I rediscovered him through Norwegian Woods)and luckily I revisited Marquez at Borders and got off to a wonderful journey that started with ten dollars. From then on I bought almost all his books and fell in love with his writing, even though he wrote in Spanish. That’s another inexplicable quality about his stories, you don’t feel like you are reading a translated piece of work, and the credit for that goes largely to Gregory Rabassa who erected a transparent (or diaphanous, as Marquez would have said) veil between the two languages to make sure you didn’t lose much in the process. And I learnt today that magical realism dies at age 87. RIP GGM. There will be one hundred years of platitude for your works, I'm sure.