Saying Goodbye To Gabo

RIP Gabriel García Márquez newrepublic.com/article/117338… http://t.co/YZUBYi6Nsi—
gorse (@gorse_journal) April 17, 2014

The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, known as “Gabo” to fans, died yesterday at age eighty-seven. Nick Caistor reflects on the Nobel laureate’s legacy:

[I]t is as a writer of fiction, enjoyed by everyone from untutored readers to academics in universities around the world, that García Márquez will be remembered. By the mid-1960s, he had published three novels that enjoyed reasonable critical acclaim in Latin America, but neither huge commercial nor international success. His fourth novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published not in Colombia but in Argentina, was to change all that. It tells the story of succeeding generations of the archetypal Buendía family and the amazing events that befall the isolated town of Macondo, in which fantasy and fact constantly intertwine to produce their own brand of magical logic. The novel has not only proved immediately accessible to readers everywhere, but has influenced writers of many nationalities, from Isabel Allende to Salman Rushdie. Although the novel was not the first example of magical realism produced in Latin America, it helped launch what became known as the boom in Latin American literature, which helped many young and talented writers find a new international audience for their often startlingly original work.

Josh Jones remarks on the “magical realism” label inextricably linked with García Márquez’s work:

While the term has perhaps been overused to the point of banality in critical and popular appraisals of Latin-American writers (some prefer Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso, “”), in Marquez’s case, it’s hard to think of a better way to describe the dense interweaving of fact and fiction in his life’s work as a writer of both fantastic stories and unflinching journalistic accounts, both of which grappled with the gross horrors of colonial plunder and exploitation and the subsequent rule of bloodthirsty dictators, incompetent patriarchs, venal oligarchs, and corporate gangsters in much of the Southern Hemisphere.

Nevertheless, it’s a description that sometimes seems to obscure García Marquez’s great purpose, marginalizing his literary vision as trendy exotica or a “postcolonial hangover.” Once asked in a Paris Review interview the year before his Nobel win about the difference between the novel and journalism, García Márquez replied, “Nothing. I don’t think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same.”

In that 1981 Paris Review interview, the author continued:

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

Michiko Kakutani also considers (NYT) how nonfiction shaped the novelist’s voice:

[T]he magic in Mr. García Márquez’s work always remained grounded in a carefully observed reality — a skill honed by his early years as a reporter. From that start, Mr. García Márquez slowly developed his own distinctive voice — a voice with the sinuous rhythms of Faulkner and Joyce, the metaphorical reach of Kafka, the dreamlike imagery of Borges. In later years, the fevered flights of fantasy that distinguished “Solitude” and “[The Autumn of the] Patriarch” would give way to a somewhat more muted sorcery, an appreciation — demonstrated in works like “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Of Love and Other Demons” — of the everyday, combined with a recognition that the extremes of human love and suffering could be found in the seemingly most ordinary of lives.

Max Fisher praises García Márquez as the author of the “greatest opening line to a book, ever,” from One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Here it is:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

The question of what constitutes the greatest first line to any novel in literary history is not something that can ever really be decided. But Marquez’s is surely as good a contender as any. It has been repeatedly ranked as one of the best, for example in 2006 by the American Book Review, which declared it the fourth-best opening line in literary history.

Nick Gillepsie questions García Marquez’s political ties – including his friendship with Fidel Castro – and Kevin Lees also ponders criticism of the writer as a public intellectual:

If the greatest criticism abroad of García Márquez is his uncritical friendship with the Castros, perhaps the greatest criticism back home, however gentle, is that he abandoned Colombia as it fell apart in the mid-1980s. Despite the increasing and unmistakable evidence of human rights abuses committed by the Colombian military during the presidency of Conservative Belisario Betancur, García Márquez waited until the last week of Betancur’s presidency to warn that the country was on the brink of a ‘holocaust.’

Meanwhile, Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo, who grew up reading García Márquez in Colombia, claims the author for her home country:

I’ve never been able to figure out how he won the Nobel Prize, or why non-Spanish speakers would like him at all. There are certainly Americans for whom his works mean a lot, but I’ve also heard from friends and colleagues that, as much as they wanted to understand and love Cien años, they found it confusing and clunky. The English translations I’ve encountered were painful to read: convoluted and awkward, even bland, when in Spanish he’s everything but. What is it like to read García Márquez in Spanish, as a Colombian? I’ve tried many times to express this to non-Spanish speakers, but explaining the beauty of one language in another language is no easy task. As García Márquez said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Interpreting our reality through a foreign framework only contributes to making us more unknown, less free, more alone.” …

It was Colombians, in the end, he was writing for; he told us our own stories back to us in the language and the music of our mothers, lovers, and friends, and we felt less alone because we had our own solitude to turn to.

“My maestro has died,” wrote novelist Isabel Allende in a statement yesterday, adding, “I will not mourn him because I have not lost him: I will continue to read his words over and over.” Explore his works available online here.