Gabriel García Márquez (26 page)

V. S. Pritchett, in the
New Yorker,
let his admiration spill forth: “the history of the Buendía family and their women in three or four generations is written as a hearsay report on the growth of the little Colombian town; it comes to life because it is continuously leaping out of fact into the mythical and the myth is comic. One obvious analogy is to Rabelais.
It is suggested, for example, that Aureliano Segundo's sexual orgies with his concubine are so enjoyable that his own livestock catch the fever. Animals and birds are unable to stand by and do nothing.” For Pritchett the story was a social history “but not as it is found in books but as it muddles its way forward and backward among the sins of family life and the accidents of trade.” He thought that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
denied interpretation. “One could say that a little Arcady was created but was ruined by the ‘Promethean ideas' that came into the head of its daring founder. Or that little lost towns have their moment—as civilizations do—and are then obliterated.”
³²

By mid-month,
Time
magazine ran an anonymous piece that sang the novel's praises. “Gabriel García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. ‘Nothing interesting has happened to me since,' he has said. His experiences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a whole individual style. Like rum
calentano,
the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind . . . Reduced to essence, the exotic Buendías become immediate—yet mythically compelling like Tolstoy's Rostov family, or the doomed scions of Faulkner's
Sartoris.
But
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is more than a family chronicle. The author is really at work on an imaginative spiritual history of any and all Latin American communities. In the process, he fondly reveals more about the Latin soul than all Oscar Lewis's selective eavesdroppings does.”
³³

García Márquez's reaction to these reviews, according to Cass Canfield Jr., was ecstatic. In time, he learned to temper his response to readers. About criticism, García Márquez
stated: “Critics for me are the biggest example of what intellectualism is. First of all, they have a theory of what a writer should be. The try to get the writer to fit their model, and if he doesn't fit, they still try to get him in by force . . . I really have no interest in what critics think of me; nor have I read criticism in many years. They have claimed for themselves the task of being intermediaries between the author and the reader. I've always tried to be a very clear and precise writer, trying to reach the reader directly without having to go through the critic.”
³⁴
García Márquez's dismissal of what critics said about him and his books runs deeper. Not only did he mistrust their instincts but he resented their pretentious philosophizing. Yet his own statements, then and later, distill a sense of false modesty, even pomposity, making him seem arrogant and aloof. It could be, of course, that his success fosters undiminished envy, for which he is penalized.

An example of this attitude is clear in an interview he gave years later to Raymond Leslie Williams. “There's no doubt that the author's vision of his or her books is very different from the vision of the critic or of the reader . . .” he stated. “Readers don't tell you why they liked the books, nor do they know why, but you feel that they really liked them. Of course, there are also people who say they don't like the books, but in general my readers seem to be swept away. And my books are sold in enormous quantities, which interests me, because that means that they are read by a broad public. They are read by elevator operators, nurses, doctors, presidents. This gives me a tremendous security, while the critics always leave the writers with a spark of insecurity. Even the most serious and praiseful critics can go off on a track you hadn't suspected, leaving you wondering if perhaps you made a mistake. Besides, I understand the critics very little. I'm not exactly sure what they are saying or what they think.” He wanted to go back to the source, to be truthful to the art of story-telling. In the same interview, García Márquez
added: “Everything comes from inside or is in my subconscious or is the natural result of an ideological position or comes from raw experience that I haven't analyzed, which I try to use in all innocence. I think I'm quite innocent in writing.”
³⁵

Hollywood quickly became interested in a screen adaptation. In a newspaper column many years later, García Márquez wrote about all the invitations he had received throughout the years to turn the novel into a movie. He described a request by Anthony Quinn, offered during a dinner party around 1977, to adapt
One Hundred Years of Solitude
into a fifty-hour TV series. He quotes Quinn as saying, “I offered him a million dollars and he didn't want them, because García Márquez is a Communist, and he doesn't want anyone to know he has received a million dollars. Because afterwards, once the dinner was over, he came and told me: How could you offer me that money in public? Some other time you can offer it to me without any witnesses nearby.” The story is more complicated. Quinn had arrived in Mexico City with the offer, which he announced to the media before he presented it to García Márquez. The Colombian told the media that he would do it not for one but for two million, one for him “and the other for the Latin American revolution.” To which Quinn responded, “I'll give him one million. The second million he can get it from someone else.” Anthony Quinn's offer wasn't the first, nor would it be the last. Some years before, a consortium of North American and European producers had offered García Márquez two million dollars. There were rumors, apparently unfounded, that Francis Ford Coppola, who directed
The Godfather
series, was also interested in an adaptation.
³⁶

Still in his forties, García Márquez was at his apex. He was considered a living treasure, and he occupied a place on the shelf of world literature.

A man's life is filled with unexpected twists and turns which shape his destiny. What would have happened if, by chance, García Márquez had not completed
One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Or if, in a burst of terrible luck, all four copies of the manuscript had been lost? Less farfetched is the possibility that a single mishap in García Márquez's life could have kept him one morning from returning to
La Cueva de la Mafia
to finalize his all-consuming literary endeavor. What then?

The idea is atrocious. It is easier for me to understand the world without a Greek island than without this essential novel.

Cyril Connolly, in his 1938 book
Enemies of Promise,
states that a writer's purpose is to create a single masterpiece. Everything must be geared in that direction. García Márquez was forty when he reached his audience. His age is crucial: it is roughly the time when, after much struggle distilling one's own style, the writer either shows the extent of his talent by stamping his vision in a single oeuvre whose value will outlast him—or he doesn't. This middle-class Colombian journalist from “
un moridero de pobres,
” a God-forsaken Caribbean town, accomplished this task. Everything he did before the Buendía saga is mere preparation. Macondo had been gestating in his imagination since childhood, ever since his grandmother filled his head with bizarre, entertaining stories. Its traces began to appear in fictional narratives he composed during his tenure as a newspaper reporter.

Today the reader recognizes those early references to Macondo, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the banana workers' massacre, and other details in stories such as “One Day After Saturday” or “Big Mama's Funeral,” or in the novellas
No One Writes the Colonel
and
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.

The literary sleuth looking for earlier drafts of Macondian history is intrigued.

For instance, “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” is a first-person account of a deluge in the mythical town. That rainstorm plays a prominent role in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
But the piece is written in an existential mode. Although it doesn't quite foretell any specific action to come in the Buendía chronicle, it served as a trigger: it enabled García Márquez to start visualizing the map of his imaginary habitat.

García Márquez's accomplishment is obvious from the response to his novel, one of universal adoration. What is mind-blowing is his reaction thereafter. Having reached his apex in 1967, what then? This isn't an academic question. As it turned out, he had not yet reached his midpoint, what Dante, in the first canto of “Hell,” the opening third of the
Divine Comedy,
described as “
nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.
” What should a writer do with the rest of his allotted time? How should he maximize it without repeating himself?

For years I thought that—paraphrasing Hamlet, whose famous last words were “The rest is silence”—the best García Márquez, the eponymous
Libertador
of Latin American culture, could do after that climax was disappear. I believed that, perhaps, for him the rest was silence, too. What else could an avid readership expect after such a bold, masterful act of invention?

I was wrong, of course.

1
. The quote is from Ana María Ochoa's essay “García Márquez, Macondismo, and the Soundscapes of Vallenato,”
Popular Music
, vol. 24, num. 2 (May 2005): 207–208. A number of scholars have explored the topic of Macondismo, among them José Joaquín Brunner in “Traditionalism and Modernity in Latin American Culture,” in
Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery
,
Hispanic Issues
vol. 28, edited by Emil Volek. New York and London: Routledge, 2002: 3–31.

2
. This ambivalence is explored by Kelly Hargrave and Georgina Smith Seminet in “De Macondo a
McOndo
: Nuevas voces en la literatura latinoamericana,”
Chasqui,
vol. 2 (November 1998): 14–26.

1
.
Los diez mandamientos.
Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1966. The translation is mine. García Márquez's piece was also published as “
Desventuras de un escritor de libros,
” in the
Magazín Dominical
of the Bogotá newspaper
El Espectador
(August 7, 1966).

2
. For instance, Raymond L. Williams, in
Gabriel García Márquez.
Boston: Twayne, 1984, offers 1928 as the birth year. Among others, Mario Vargas Llosa, in
García Márquez: Historia de un
deicidio.
Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971, makes the same mistake.

3
. “
Ni yo soy diablo ni Gabito es santo: Luis Enrique,
” in Silvia Galvis,
Los García Márquez
. Bogotá: Océano and Arango Editores, 1997: 133.

4
. See Dasso Saldívar,
García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla
. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997: 86, and Gerald Martin,
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009: 29. Saldívar gives the exact time of the writer's birth a half hour earlier: 8:30 A.M.

5
. Gerald Martin,
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
: 40.

6
. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza,
The Fragrance of Guava
, translated by Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1983: 52.

7
. García Márquez, “
Caribe mágico,
” in
Notas de prensa: 1980–1984
. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 59–62.

8
. The sentence serves as the epigraph to Herbert Braun,
The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia
. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

9
. Mario Vargas Llosa,
García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio
. Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971: 14.

10
. Gabriel García Márquez,
Living to Tell the Tale
, translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003: 14–15.

11
. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez: The Art of Fiction,”
Paris Review
, no. 82 (1981), reprinted in
The Paris Review Interviews
, vol. II, edited by Philip Gourevich, prologue by Orhan Pamuk. New York: Picador, 2007: 190–191.

12
. Gabriel García Márquez, foreword to
La Casa Grande
by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, translated by Seymour Menton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991: xi.

13
. Silvia Galvis,
Los García Márquez
. Bogotá: Océano Arango Editores, 1997: 259.

14
. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza,
The Fragrance of Guava
: 19.

15
. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 188.

16
. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 189.

17
. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza,
The Fragrance of Guava
: 18.

18
. Gabriel García Márquez,
Living to Tell the Tale
: 68.

19
. Pete Hamill, “Love and Solitude,”
Vanity Fair
(March 1988): 131. See also Dasso Saldívar,
El viaje a la semilla
: 89–90.

20
. Gabriel García Márquez,
Living to Tell the Tale
: 70.

21
. Dasso Saldívar,
El viaje a la semilla
: 79–90.

22
. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza,
The Fragrance of Guava
: 19–20.