BOOK REVIEW OF 'GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ' BY GERALD MARTIN

BOOK REVIEW PUBLISHED IN 'THINK INDIA', A QYARTERLY JOURNAL

THINK INDIA VOLUME 12 NO. 2 APRIL-JUNE 2009


Gabriel Garcia Marquez
by Gerald Martin
Hardback, pp. xxiii + 664, BLOOMSBURY, 2008
£25 / Rs.1395

SUJIT CHOWDHURY

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the living legends of contemporary literature has the enviable position of changing the way the world views modern writing. Introducing magic realism to a world preoccupied with the manifested reality, he infused life and excitement into the literary scene. In an instant he made a perspective shift in the way literature would be read and viewed and it would not be hyperbolic to say that he wrested the hegemony of the literary power centre - suddenly Latin America turned from a geographical continent to an intellectual realm of myriad possibilities. His personal life has been characterized by full blooded passion, replete with mysteries and myth, enigmas and contradictions. Besides being a prolific writer, Marquez has been a journalist, script-writer, political statesman, diplomatic mediator, founder of many organizations and owner of broadcasting company and press. It is indeed daunting for anyone to portray Marquez objectively in his entirety, without falling prey to his charisma and without putting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of his multifaceted and complex personality. Gerald Martin's biography is balanced and well researched. Martin is well aware of his limitations as a biographer since Marquez never gave him a 'heart to heart' insight into his personal life, never revealed his secrets and always gave different versions of his life-stories on different occasions - a unique Marquezian trait that the biographer calls 'mythomania'. Separating the myth and the reality in Marquez’s life is like separating oil and water, an analogy that he himself gave for his writing where it is impossible to separate reality from fiction.[i] Marquez, now over eighty two years old, has been leading an active life fighting against lymphatic cancer and:
“ …he, the person and the persona, knows he has already entered the pantheon of literary giants and wants full control, in death as in life, of everything that has to do with his life and craft.”[ii]
This is the double standard of the Hispanic world and no biography and autobiography can be free from this idiosyncrasy.
The childhood memories in Aracataca where ‘Gabito’ (Marquez's family nickname) was born on March 6, 1927 amid an unseasonal rainstorm with the umbilical cord around his neck in his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicholas Marquez’s house form the core of his creative universe. His mother Luisa Santiaga had married Gabriel Elegio, then a telegraph operator against the will of her father. After giving birth to Gabito she left the child under the custody of Colonel. Gabito grew in a family full of women. Colonel was his companion and role model as Martin says,
“the author would turn the different images of his expeditions with his grandfather into a self-defining experience that a fictional son has with his father, thereby subliminally confirming that Nicolas was not only his grandfather but also the father he felt he never had. (Page 30)”
Marquez gradually developed a vivid imagination through the legends, myths, fables, anecdotes and real events as told by his grandfather and the superstitions and premonitions of his grandmother. These two opposing world-views are synthesized by him when he embarked upon his literary journey. Martin analyses,
“ Many years later, when Garcia Marquez managed to reconstruct these two ways of interpreting and narrating reality, both of them involving a tone of absolute reality - the worldly, rationalizing sententiousness of his grandfather and the other-worldly oracular declamations of his grandmother – leavened by his own inimitable sense of humour, he would be able to develop a world-view and a corresponding narrative technique which would be instantly recognizable to the readers of each new book.(Page 37)”
This synthesis shaped his style that is called magical realism that represents fantastic episodes narrated in a matter-of-fact way or real events narrated in a fantastic manner. It is an amalgamation of realism and fantasy, as he recreated all his experiences in his Arcataca house in his writings later to get rid of his anguished childhood. The house, as Martin says,
“…becomes materialized for all eternity as the magical world of Macondo, at which point the view from Colonel Marquez’s house would encompass not only the little town of Arcataca but also the rest of his native Columbia and indeed the whole of Latin America and beyond. (Page 30)”
Thus, Macondo emerges as a metaphor for Latin America.
When Marquez was taken away by his father to Since where his family had shifted, the Colonel died after a fall while rescuing the family parrot. His death kept on haunting Marquez reminisces, “ …I couldn’t find someone to replace him, because my father was never a proper substitute” and “ since then nothing important happened to me. Everything has just been flat. (Page 59 & 60)” As a school student Marquez had started writing poetry and had found his life mate, Mercedes Barcha when she was nine years old. He had a premonition : “One day he would marry her!” It turned out to be a reality some fourteen years later. In his college days, he voraciously read literature, history, psychology and Marxism. Afterwards, he went to the National University at Bogota to study law. It was there that he found a close group of friends interested in contemporary literature and politics and discovered Kafka’s Metamorphosis. After reading Kafka he told himself, “Shit, that’s just the way my grandmother talked.” The storyteller inside him got a voice with a widened imagination. His first story The Third Resignation, narrated around the motif of an unburied corpse, was published in a progressive newspaper El Espectador in September 1947; followed soon by his second one Eva is Inside her Cat. Most of his early short stories revolve around 'death' that became a lifelong obsession and a recurring theme with “necrophiliac tendencies…obsessed with living death.”[iii]
His short stories started getting appreciated and he started getting recognized as a promising writer. Reading James Joyce was another major influence and Marquez started exploring the Latin American problematic of genealogy and identity, a crucial subject in a continent that has no satisfactory myth of origin, with a modernist style. This problematic is resolved finally in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1978). Martin comments,
“ This genealogical, dynastic obsession and the parallel exploration of the entire universe (time, space, matter, spirit, idea; life, death, burial, corruption, metamorphosis) is a structure of thought and feeling which, once explicitly explored and elaborated, will apparently disappear from Garcia Marquez’s work but will in fact become implicit and its manifestations used sparingly, strategically, for maximum effect. (Page 103 & 104) ”
Due to political violence in 1948, the University was closed and Marquez left for Cartagena to complete his studies. He joined a newspaper El Universal to financially support himself and started writing columns and reports. Afterwards, discontinuing his study, he went to Barranquilla and joined El Heraldo. There he came into contact with a bohemian group of intellectuals, writers and artists called the ‘Barranquilla Group’. Through this group, he was exposed to the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Ernst Hemingway. One day, Luisa came to Barranquilla to take Marquez to Arcataca for selling the old Colonel’s house. His visit to Arcataca proved to be a turning point as Marquez later told Martin, “…I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only appreciating. (Page 137)” He had already written a draft of an unpublished novel La Casa (The House) based on his childhood experiences but after his visit there was a change in his viewpoint as Martin says that Marquez realized,
“ ‘The House’ was not in fact the real house but a fictional construct intended to screen it. Now, at last, he was preparing to openly confront the edifice which had been haunting him for so many years and to rebuild the old town, which he still retained in his imagination, around it. Thus was Macondo Born. (Page 137)”
Marquez had reinvented the narrative that he finally wrote as One Hundred Years of Solitude with an awareness of the multiple dimensions of time. It was a literary transition from a Kafkaesque to a Borgesian perspective.
Marquez again returned to Bogota to join El Espectador and apart from writing reports and columns, he started to write on cinema, a new trend that he pioneered in Latin America. His reports were filled with drama, irony, satire and humor so much so that his reportage read like stories. Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1989) is an example of his semi-journalistic work. Leaf Storm was published in Spanish in 1955 and the same year he left for Europe. He visited Geneva, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Rome. This sojourn exposed him to the totalitarian face of communism as well as to the neo-realistic movement in Cinema. In December 1955, he left for Paris with an intention to write. His one and half year’s stay in Paris was full of struggle, poverty and self-exploration. He developed an intimate relationship with Tachia, a Spanish actress. He started writing In Evil Hours (1991) with his newly acquired cinematographic precision. Its narrative is based on the effects of the violence in Columbia. Tachia became pregnant and she had to abort the baby and their relationship broke. Marquez faced extreme hardship as he had no money. He finished writing No One Writes to the Colonel (1974), an allegorical novella on the irony of human fate. It was based upon the story of Colonel Nicolas waiting for his pension that never came; like Marquez waiting for financial help from his friends and like Mercedes waiting in Barranquilla for Marquez to marry her. In the narrative Colonel has a fighting rooster that his wife wants to sell as they have no money to buy food. Colonel finally decides to prepare the cock for the fight. Marquez achieves liberation through dignity and rebellion; through cynicism and epiphany in a concise, terse and direct narrative like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The climax reflects the power and determination to survive. Marquez’s experiences in Paris gave him tremendous strength of character, refined his literary craft, and matured his political consciousness. Before returning back to Latin America, Marquez visited West and East Germany, Eastern Europe, USSR and London with his friends. As a whole, his stay in Europe gave him a global perspective as a journalist as well as a writer.
In December 1957, Marquez returned to Caracas, the Venezuelan capital to join Momento and after settling down, he suddenly decided to marry Mercedes and the couple got married on 21 March 1958 at Barranquilla. Soon he wrote Big Mama’s Funeral, another allegorical story on a dictatorial character. The story reflects his frustration, pessimism and anger against rampant violence in Columbia. This was the end of Marquez’s neo-realist phase and beginning of a mature phase. It was, as Martin notes,
“...something quite new: It is one of the key texts of Garcia Marquez’s entire literary and political trajectory, the one which unites his two literary modes - ‘realist’ and ‘magical’ … fusion of different elements within Garcia Marquez’s personal mythology and poetics. (Page 254)”
During this period Marquez got closer to Fidel Castro and helped him setting up Latin American Press. This was the time of Latin Americanization and rise of a universal vision in literature that subsequently gave rise to ‘The Boom’[iv], a literary movement. This movement was a ‘quest for Latin American Identity’ in a continent marred by lack of unity and political rivalry. Two events that proved to be the turning points in Marquez’s career were his inclusion in the list of contemporary writers of ‘The Boom’ by Luis Harss and his contract with Carmen Balcells, an influential literary agent from Barcelona with strong links not only in Spain but also in Europe.
One day a happy Marquez was taking his family for a vacation driving his Opel when,
“..from nowhere’, the first sentence of a novel floated down into his brain. Behind it, invisible but palpable, was the entire novel, there as if dictated-downloaded from above. It was as powerful, as irresistible as a magic spell. The secret formula of the sentence was in the point of view and above all, in the tone: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad…Garcia Marquez, as if in a trance, pulled over at the roadside, turned the Opel around, and drove back in the direction of Mexico City. And the…(Page 295)”
And the rest is history!
Marquez came back home and locked himself in a room for more than a year and started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude in a frenzy to discover an altogether new narrative fusing the history of his family with the history of Latin America, blending all the literary ingredients, styles and tricks that he had learnt over the years in a literary alchemy, coalescing many real-life characters to recreate representative characters of his story of the Buendia family and Macondo. By interweaving anecdotes, events, folklore and fables and by their artful redeployment, he crystallized the flamboyant Hispanic America's popular imagination that is both exotic and anachronistic. It is, what Martin says, “…a macrocosm contained within a microcosm: it begins and ends in biblical style and contains some of the universal myths of anthropology, the characteristic themes of Western culture and the peculiar negative thrust of Latin America's own specific experience of grandiose experience and humiliating failure. (Page 301)”
Thus Macondo emerged as the greatest collective portrait of the Third World and the narrative of One Hundred Years of Solitude became the trans-historical and an a-temporal paradigm of magical-realism. When the book was published in Spanish in 1970, it cast a magical spell and Marquez became the master magician.
He was a celebrity now; his every word counted and every move carefully watched. He moved to Barcelona with his family where he stayed for almost eight years. Franco was still the dictator of Spain and the obsession for power and authority started engaging Marquez. He had seen Stalin's embalmed corpse and had envisioned the ugly and monstrous manifestations of a natural human predicament: ‘love for power’. His continent had seen many dictators. Marquez started synthesizing all the Latin American dictators to create an ideal-typical dictator protagonist in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1978), a complex and almost autobiographical novel. He addressed memory, nostalgia, solitude and death from a solitary dictator's viewpoint. Was the construct of a patriarch/dictator Colonel Nicolas Marquez, Fidel Castro or his own alter-ego? This marked another transition for Marquez; from a modernist writer to a post-modernist one.
Many historic events in the continent compelled Marquez to plunge into the political arena. He asserted that Latin America should resist the neo-colonial interests of the USA and the USSR and it should choose the path of democratic socialism of which Cuba was the best example. He also established Alternativia, a political magazine, at Bogota. When Jimmy Carter became the President, the US policy became more focused on human rights and Marquez found this as an opportunity to correct the excesses done in various political regimes in Latin America. Through his proximity with Fidel Castro and Francois Mitterand he got many political prisoners released from Cuba and Panama. He also helped in unifying the Sandinista in Nicaragua and established an organization called Habeas to deal with human rights issues in Latin America. As a whole, his political activism was confined to facilitating democratization in Latin America.
By the end of 1979, Marquez decided to resume writing as he got somewhat disillusioned with his political activism and diplomatic mediations. In September 1980, he wrote a self-critical story, The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow. It was a sort of self-exorcism wherein Marquez dealt with his guilt for Tachia and their aborted baby. He also finished writing Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1983), a novel based on an old real event in Sucre in which a boy was killed by two brothers in a vendetta. The killing had haunted Marquez and he finally wrote this story after thirty years in a reverse detective style narrative in which there is no suspense as the death is apparent right from the beginning. The story is told from the viewpoint of a journalist who visits the town after a long time to unravel the mystery. During this time, he was accused of helping the M-19 guerilla movement through his Cuban links and Marquez family took a temporary asylum in Mexico. Enraged by such allegations, Marquez retorted, “…a country without an organized left…that spends its life dividing itself into pieces, can’t do anything. (Page 416)” This statement encapsulates the pessimism of Columbia at large.
Though Marquez alienated himself from active political life, he started writing commentaries on various subjects every week from 1980 to 1984. He was looking for something optimistic to counter the political pessimism and he found that nothing could be better than ‘power of love’ in contrast to ‘love for power’ that he had dealt earlier. The love-affair between his parents, the relationship between a man whom he had rather hated and a woman whom he hardly knew, started getting animated.
On 21st October 1982, Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize to him. The Nobel Speech entitled The Solitude of Latin America that Marquez delivered was more political than literary. It raised a basic problem: the need to understand Latin America in its own perspective; a polemic against the prevalent Eurocentric perception of Latin American history, culture, politics and problems. Marquez, recounting the shocking figures of injustice in various countries in Latin America, said:
“…it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression…a reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Columbian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude…the interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary…why is the originality so readily granted to us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?....to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.”[v]
Clearly and forcefully, Marquez puts the Latin American vision and aspirations on a global platform. It was a deconstructed magical realism with encoded political message. With the most coveted Nobel Prize, Marquez’s name and fame reached new heights. He was ‘Gabo’ for his admirers ,but for the world he was an icon. There was a much bigger role for him to play in the international arena. In the years to come, he would be in the panel of UNESCO’s MacBride Commission on monopoly on communication and Forum of Reflection discussing the challenges before humanity in the 21st century with Vaclav Havel, Umberto Eco and Edward Said. He would address the summits of G-6 and the Non-Aligned Movement. He would share the dais with Bill Clinton, many other head of states and luminaries.
As Marquez wanted to counter political pessimism with the optimism of ‘power of love’ he had started writing half of the novel based on his parent’s love affair but further writing was interrupted by a business trip to Europe and his father’s death. He destroyed the manuscript and started all over again to rewrite Love in the Time of Cholera (1988) from a changed perspective on love, old age, widowhood, and death. The narrative of this novel is a love triangle based in Cartagena between Doctor Juvenal Urbino (a character taken from his grandfather and a real character who was their family doctor in Arcataca), Florentino Ariza, a shipping clerk and poet (a character taken from his father and himself) and Fermina Daza (a character based on Mercedes, Tachia and his mother). The Doctor represents the European modernity and the elite whereas Florentino symbolizes the Columbian lower class. The story starts with the death of the Doctor from the fall while rescuing the parrot, a real incident when the Colonel fell from the ladder and finally died. With flashbacks, the narrative leads us back to the young Fermina who loved and then rejected Florentino to marry the Doctor. Florentino waited for half a century and struggled his way up to become a rich man. He turns up at Urbino’s funeral and rekindles the flame of love: “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.” Finally, he gets Fermina and they sail together in a boat towards eternity where time ceases and freezes. Time is defeated by the power of love. Thus the narrative reaches a sublime crescendo. Marquez has blended romance, soap opera, social comedy, folklore and popular music. The novel is a “…curious mixture of the bland and the banal with the ruthlessly realistic and the profound. (Page 457)”. While reviewing the book Thomas Pynchon said,
“There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among the hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never a worth a less honorable name than remembrance – at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.”[vi]
While Marquez was spreading the message of love, a triangular violence was erupting in Columbia that would soon turn into ‘War against Drugs’, having international ramifications. He wrote a political book Clandestine in Chile (1989) based upon the experiences of the film maker Miguel Littin about Pinochet’s dictatorship. He was vehemently advocating for a greater unity among Latin American countries as the USSR was disintegrating and USA was aggressively pursuing its hidden agenda of neo-colonialism under Ronald Reagan. For this unity, cultural unification was necessary. Marquez, with support from Fidel Castro and Latin American film makers, established Foundation for New Latin American Cinema at Havana and International School for Cinema and Television (EICTV) for students from Latin America, Africa and Asia. He hardly gave rights to any American film makers except for Love in the Time of Cholera[vii] that was directed by Mike Newell. He refused to sell the rights for One Hundred Years of Solitude even after getting an offer of $ 2 million. Marquez was well aware of the potential, possibilities and limitations of cinema or television and literature. He said in an interview, “I would like cinema as a form of artistic expression to have the same value in Latin America that literature has at the moment.” [viii] He advocated for soap operas on TV because it reaches millions across countries instantaneously unlike literature and started making soap operas with meaningful social cultural messages. He started on a project of making a series of six films based on his stories called Amores dificiles (Difficult Loves). Subsequently, he made Oedipus the Mayor and then Arturo Ripstein made a film on No One Writes to the Colonel. Financially and technically, his films were not successful more because he “…needed a film-maker of his own stature and that it would probably require a director with Bunuel’s idiosyncratic genius to do him justice.” [ix] Critics say that these films were packaged as Marquezian commodity as, “…the novelist is just slotted into the attraction slot in place of a famous actor…(it) sells itself as a product on the marketable don Gabo. Meanwhile, the dependence of the entire package upon Garcia Marquez’s participation gives him inordinate control over the contracting of principals and the handling of the treatments.” [x] Clearly, the persona of ‘Gabo’ overshadowed his films and contained the creative elements of film-making.
In his endeavor towards cultural unity, Marquez embarked upon a very challenging project - to write a novel on Simon Bolivar, the great liberator of Latin America from the Spanish rule. It was an appropriate subject to unite the culturally and politically disunited Latin American countries during a critical period in Latin American history. He was taking a major literary and political risk as el Liberatador was a Latin American icon; revered all across the continent. Gene Bell-Villada writes:
“The Bolivar Mythology is a cultural force to be reckoned with. Citizens of most South American countries have had the idealized lore hammered into their tender minds since grade school, and the ritual veneration of the ‘liberator’ is further reinforced by public statues, politician’s rhetoric, place names, and even the national currency.” [xi]
Marquez’s new venture involved extensive historical research. Finally, as a novelist he chose to cover the last phase of Bolivar’s life – “a disillusioned man who is sailing through the Magdalena River towards self-exile”. Bolivar’s last journey is not revealed by any memoir or letters and it gave him a creative freedom “…to invent his own stories within the limits of historical verisimilitude. (Page 475)” Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Latin America from Spanish domination and slavery after twenty years of war, gives the continent its cultural and political identity. Ultimately, his dream of a unified Latin America is shattered when fragmentation of the newly created republics start. He realizes that there is no place for him and he chooses self-exile. Marquez portrays Bolivar in a most naturalistic manner with a conscious aim of humanizing the great leader instead of monumentalizing him, solely with a purpose to prove that the vision of the great leader for a unified Latin American is relevant. Marquez was successful in handling a most politically and emotionally sensitive subject with his artistry as Mark Webster wrote:
“…the combination of Garcia Marquez' myth-making talents and Bolivar's own mythical public persona is intriguing. The dangers of such an undertaking are multiple, ranging from public censure for daring to write about such a reverent figure to an excess of factual information in the story at the expense of creativity. Garcia Marquez succeeds for the most part. Bolivar's epic accomplishments and strong character gain immediacy and resonance without diminishing the towering myth of The Liberator.” [xii]
With the launch of Of Love and other Demons in 1994 Bogota Book Fair, the magic of Macondo was back. In the preface, Marquez writes that in 1949 when he was a young reporter in Cartagena, he covered a story of a skull with twenty two meters long bright copper red hair that was found while two centuries old Santa Clara convent was being converted into a hotel (it really happened a year later) and tombs were being relocated. He did not find the story very trivial as his grandmother had once told him the legend of a twelve year old girl with very long hair who had died of rabies. Marquez recreates Cartagena of the 18th century as a centre of slave trade and Catholic inquisition. Sierva María, a girl going to be twelve and suspected to have contracted rabies, is sent to the convent to be exorcized. The young priest-exorcist finds that it is he who needs healing and gradually he falls in love and is punished for heresy. The Bishop starts the exorcism and Maria dies during the torture. In a way, the novel says that it is the African culture that the Church demonizes and tries to exorcise. A.S. Byatt, while reviewing the novel says:
“The world is the familiar Garcia Marquez world, a mixture of phantasmagoria and a realism whose truths seem as incredible and strange as the moments of demonic magic. The tale -- spare and swift in the telling -- has all the ineluctable, irrational fatality of ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, though the love story, also grim and driven, has none of the comic and inconsequential gentleness of ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’….real forces of destruction are the beliefs of the Spanish and the Christians. This is partly to do with the clash of cultures between them and the Africans among whom Sierva Maria has grown up.”[xiii]
In 1995, Marquez established the Foundation for Ibero-American Journalism to train young journalists of Latin America. He considered journalism as a literary activity that indicates a major shift in his viewpoint. For him, journalism and fiction-writing are complementary to each other. His documentary novel, News of a Kidnapping (1997) clearly vindicates his conviction as he “…encapsulates Columbia’s labyrinthine complexity within the dramas of seven central characters (Page 519).” and gives a chilling account based on long interviews with the surviving victims of the kidnappings.
Now, Marquez was feeling old, depressed and was beginning to loose memory. Memory was the wellspring of his imagination and creativity and he used to call himself a ‘professional rememberer’. He planned to write his memoirs in three parts and dissociated himself from political activities temporarily, particularly from the upheavals in Columbia. He said to Martin, “…the country will always be the same. There has always been civil war, there have always been guerillas, and there always will be. It’s a way of life there. (Page 537).” In 1999, he was diagnosed of lymphatic cancer and went to Los Angeles for treatment. On the political front, the things were changing for the worse and the illness provided him a reason to devote his time to write, to introspect and look back into his own life. He had already bought ‘Cambio’, a popular magazine through which he used to occasionally comment on the political problems. Sometimes in the mid-2001, when he was planning to publish the first part of his memoirs, the news of his mother’s death came but he could not make to her funeral. Finally, his memoir was published as Living to Tell the Tale (2003).
The memoir begins with the incident when Luisa, his mother, had suddenly appeared in Barranquilla to take him to Arcataca to the sell the old house. For Marquez, this visit was the single most important experience of his life; a ‘definitive confirmation of his literary vocation’. This trip had sealed his destiny as a writer by awakening his taste for recounting the ‘earthly paradise of desolation and nostalgia’ that was buried in the deep recesses of his unconscious mind all along and had sprang into life as soon as he had entered into the desolate dusty town and the decaying old house. The memoir starts with this trip and goes back to his childhood and covers the period up to 1955, when Marquez, the young journalist goes to Geneva to cover the Big-4 meeting at the UN. The memoir ends at suspense: a letter received from Mercedes in reply to his proposal to marry her. In the epigraph he gives a disclaimer: “Life is not what one lived but what one remembers it in order to recount it.” Martin says that Marquez is uncomfortable with the genre of autobiography itself because in his fictions he is declarative and fabulist; his style with its ingredients of fantasy, hyperbole, antithesis, displacement, dreams etc. becomes incongruous with a matter-of-fact autobiography. Above all, Marquez believed in a compartmentalized public, private and secret life. Martin says, “The book contains his public life and his ‘false’, invented life, but it does not contain much of his ‘private’ life and very little indeed of his ‘secret’ life. (Page 544)”. Michiko Kakutani in her review writes:
“ …magical memoir makes clear, the sources of his phantasmagorical work lies as much in his family’s anomalous past and his own experiences as they do in the convoluted politics and historical woes of his native Columbia…..Marquez uses an elliptical narrative in these pages, cutting back and forth in time to show how memory colors experience, how time moves on a Proustian loop between the present and the past.”[xiv]
With this memoir, Marquez, fighting against cancer, was again back with his magic and narcissism.
Along with his memoir, Marquez had been slowly working on a novel for last few years that finally came as Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). It is a story of an old man, a Spanish and Latin scholar and a columnist in Barranquilla, who wants to treat himself on his ninetieth birthday with a passionate night with an adolescent virgin. He has been a bachelor and he always had paid sex. Through the madam of a brothel, he meets a fourteen year old poor girl who is too tired with her hard day’s work at a sewing factory and who is drugged by the madam. The unnamed protagonist just watches the sleeping girl who beneath all the cosmetics and decoration is raw - ‘a tender young fighting bull’ who turns in his imagination into an ‘absolute mistress of her virginity’. In the morning the old man feels free - free from the servitude to sex that had enslaved him since childhood. Night after night, he returns to the brothel to watch the girl sleeping; he sings songs and tells her fairy tales. He calls her Delgadina. Ultimately he finds his first and true love at the age of ninety and decides to bequeath her all his property. Here, Marquez revisits earlier characters and themes. The protagonist reminds of Aureliano Buendia from One Hundred Years of Solitude who meets an adolescent mulatto girl in a whorehouse who has to sleep with innumerable men every night to pay back her cruel grandmother to make up the loss of their burnt house. Troubled by a need to protect and love her, he comes out of her house and decides to marry her. In Of Love and Other Demons, Father Delaura is declared heretic for falling in love with the twelve year old Sierva Maria. Maria remains a virgin and dies for him - her immortal love is symbolized by her ever-growing radiant copper color hair that keeps on growing over two centuries. The striking similarity between the nonagenarian protagonist and the old Florentio Ariza from Life in the Time of Cholera and the narrative treatment resolves the issue of the relationship between an old man and a young girl, a recurring motif in Marquez’s work. J.M. Coetzee, a Nobel Laureate for Literature 2003 himself, writes:
“The parallels between the books, published two decades apart, are too striking to ignore. They suggest that in ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’ Garcia Marquez may be having another go at the artistically and morally unsatisfactory story of Florentino and América in ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’… The conceptual strategy Garcia Marquez employs toward this end is to break down the wall between erotic passion and the passion of veneration….once we accept a continuity between the passion of sexual desire and the passion of veneration, then what originates as “bad” desire of the kind practiced by Florentino Ariza upon his ward can without changing its essence mutate into “good” desire of the kind felt by Delgadina’s lover, and thus constitute the germ of a new life for him. ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’ makes most sense, in other words, as a kind of supplement to ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, one in which the violator of the trust of the virgin child becomes her faithful worshiper.”[xv]
The novel though not very accomplished by Marquezian standards is a “velvety pleasure to read” as John Updike commented, “ …while he is still alive, (he) has composed, with usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying ligt.” [i] In fact, Marquez was fighting death with love and he had already “...entered the spirit of the age and he had also risen above and beyond the spirit of the age, into immortality, eternity.” [xvi]
While Marquez was living a reclusive life and recovering from his illness, Latin America was celebrating the 400th Anniversary of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, followed by the 40th Anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude that coincided with his eightieth birthday. Martin says,
“ Like Cervantes, Garcia Marquez had explored the dreams and delusions of his characters which, at a certain time in history, had been those of Spain and had then, in a different form, become those of Latin America after independence…like Cervantes, he had created a mood, a humor…which was instantly recognizable and, once it came into existence, seemed to have always been there and was an integral part of the world to which it referred. (Page 560) ”
Marquez was being monumentalized in his own life time; something that he had disliked and hence had written on Simon Bolivar. Once again, Marquez started making public appearances with the rich and the powerful like Bill Gates, King and Queen of Spain, Bill Clinton, many past and present heads of States, celebrities and luminaries. In one of such appearances he said: “I’ve still not got over my surprise that all this has happened to me.” It is a humble statement but is it true of a man who always liked power and authority? Is there no contradiction between his material circumstances and ideological beliefs? There are so many contradictions and Marquez never came out straight, a fact that Martin also admits.
Ilan Stavans who has been a vociferous critic of Marquez gives another perspective to this apparent tension between lifestyle and politics as a prevalent trend among the famous Latin American intellectuals in the 70s of which Marquez is just one example: “…he epitomizes this outrageous behavior…he is a symbol of lavish lifestyle and anachronistic Franciscan principle: the revolutionary struggle amid champagne glasses.”[xvii] When Susana Cato in an interview asked him,” What is your view of poverty now that you are a rich man?”, Marquez replied, “ I’m not rich, but rather a poor man with money. It’s just that now I don’t have a poor man’s problems. My view is of the utmost importance because I know what the real difference is between wealth and poverty.”[xviii] He is referring to his hand to mouth days and it is difficult to give a value-judgment. He has used his name and fame; newspapers have happily paid him a sum of $50,000 for 30 minutes interview and he has used this money to fund his foundations for cinema and journalism - a greater intellectual cause for cultural unification.
Marquez’s intellectual and literary journey has many missing steps and his personal life largely remains in shadow. That is the reason he remains “…a literary subject in search of a biographer…to recover, uncover and discover; to trace lost steps on the map of the subject’s existence”. [xix] The available biographical materials are scarce except Mario Vargas Llosa’s Garcia Marquez: Historia De Un Deicidio (1971)[xx] that deals with the historical-political contexts of the ‘Boom’ and the role of Marquez, and Plenio Mendoza’s The Fragrance of Guava (1988)[xxi] an account of Marquez through conversations and scattered interviews. Moreover, Marquez always destroyed all his literary notes and personal papers including all the letters that he had written to Mercedes. As a result, it is difficult to trace the evolution of his literary style, changes, influences and sources. On personal front, he always wanted to project himself in a manner that suited him without any past. It makes the biographer’s job more difficult in examining the intricate relationship between his life and his craft. Ilan Stavans rightly stresses for the need of a biography:
“A biography is needed to bring perspective to his story, at once to render his aspired heroism in human scale and to render his routine existence in the form of narrative art. For the biographer’s craft, at its best, is one that at once reduces and magnifies its subject, discovering the ordinariness within the art, but also making art of that very ordinariness”.[xxii]
It was only in January 2006 that Marquez announced that Gerald Martin is his biographer. Gerald Martin is a scholar of Latin American Literature that has helped him to put Marquez in a larger perspective. He has meticulously traced Marquez’s literary and political development and has handled the complexities of his political and diplomatic life by correlating the circumstantial compulsions. But by the end, the biographer seems to be mesmerized by the magic of his own subject, and by elevating Marquez to the level of Cervantes the biography slips into a hagiography. Martin has not explored the complexity of this relationship between ‘Gabito’ and his parents especially with his father. Marquez has written an account of the tumultuous courtship between his parents as told to him by his parents (this subject was never discussed in Colonel’s house). Marquez wrote:
“They were both excellent storytellers, happy in their recollection of their love, but they were also so impassioned in their accounts that when I was past fifty and had decided at last to use their story in the Love in the Time of Cholera, I couldn’t distinguish between life and poetry.”[xxiii]
Similarly, the thread of the relationship between Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa is lost midway in the book and Martin is almost silent on Marquez’s relationship with Pablo Neruda.
As a whole, Gerald Martin has been successful in portraying Marquez, in his pitfalls and strengths, and in the process he has been able to bridge the gap between the myth and the reality of Marquez. Martin, in the foreword, mentions that this biography is an abbreviated version of a much longer project, as over seventeen years of his tenacious research he has collected over two thousand pages and six thousand footnotes, that he intends to publish within few years. The urgency of the present biography was the purpose that the maestro could read it while he is alive. We earnestly wait for Martin’s final and fuller version of the biography, revealing more of ‘Gabito’, ‘Gabo’ and of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Note: The year of publication mentioned with the titles of Marquez’s books is of English Titles.
[i] Bacon, Susan : Review of Videos : Conversations with Latin American Writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez Hispania Vol. 84 No. 4 (Dec. 2001)
[ii] Ilan Stevans : Gabo in Decline, Transitions, No. 62 (1993)
[iii] Updike, John, ‘Dying for Love: A new Novel by Garcia Marquez’, The New Yorker, 7 November 2005
[iv]‘The Boom’ is a period in Latin America’s literary history from 1950s to 1970s when it received unprecedented publicity and appreciation in the West. In the beginning of the Boom, the prominent writers were Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Juna Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbia) among many others. They were highly influenced by the novelistic experimentations in the structure, stylistics and chronology in the American and European writers notable among them were William Faulkner, James Joyce, William James and Verginia Woolf. This movement was also influenced by the specific socio-political events of Latin America like ongoing violence, dictatorship and Cuban Revolution. Their work emphasized the need for unity among Latin American Countries and as a whole represented the rise of ‘Third World’. These writers challenged the established conventions and style. In the beginning, their work was realistic with existential pessimism and narrative linearity. By 1960s, the characters and chronology became more complex, intricate and cyclical. The later Boom Period was criticized as elitist as it did not represent the common Latin American man’s problems and predicaments. By the end of 1970s, their style became itself stereotypical without innovative qualities and gradually, it fragmented for ideological and literary reasons.

[v] Literature 1981-1990, Ed. Tore Frangsmyr & Sture Allan, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993 Ilan
[vi] Pynchon, Thomas, ‘The Heart’s Eternal Vow’, The New York Times, April 10, 1988
[vii]Love in the Time of Cholera (English), Stone Village Pictures, 2007
[viii] Cato, Susan, ‘Soap Operas Are Wonderful. I’ve Always wanted to Write One ’(Interview:1987) reprinted in Conversations with GGM, University of Mississippi Press, 2006
[ix] Excelsior, 7 August 1990: Mel Gussow’s Review of Salvador Tavora’s adaptation of Chronicle of a Death Foretold in New York Times
[x] Rich, B. Ruby ‘ An/Other view of New Latin American Cinema’, published in ‘New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations’, Ed. Michael T. Martin, Wayne State University Press, 1997 Page 293
[xi] Gene Bell-Villada, Editorial Introduction to ‘Conversations with GGM’, University of Mississippi Press, 2006
[xii] Webster, Mark: The General in his Labrynth, review published in The Tech, Vol. 110, Issue 36, September 21, 1990
[xiii] Byatt, A. S. ‘ Of Love Possessed’, New York Times, May 28 1995
[xiv] Kakutani, Michiko, ‘A Family Haunted by Ghosts of Time’, New York Times, November 11, 2003

[xv] Coetzee, J. M. , ‘Sleeping Beauty’, New York Times, February 13, 2006.
[xvi] Updike, John, ‘Dying For Love’, New Yorker, November 7, 2005.
[xvii] Stavans, Ilan,‘Gabo in Decline’, published in Transition, No. 62 , Indiana University Press, 1993 page 62
[xviii] Cato, Susan, ‘Soap Operas Are Wonderful. I’ve Always wanted to Write One (Interview:1987) reprinted in Conversations with GGM’, University of Missisipi Press, 2006
[xix] Stavans, Ilan,‘Gabo in Decline’, Transition, No. 62, Indiana University Press, 1993 page 67
[xx] Llosa, Mario Vargas, ‘ Garcia Marquez: Hitorica De Un Deicido’, Barral Editor, 1971
[xxi] Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo (Ed.), ‘The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with GGM’, Trans. Ann Wright, Faber , London (1988)
[xxii] Stavans, Ilan , ‘Gabo in Decline’, Transition, No. 62 , Indiana University Press, 1993 page 67
[xxiii] Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, ‘‘ How My Father Won My Mother’, Trans. Edith Grossman, New Yorker, February 19/26 2001


SUJIT CHOWDHURY IS FINANCIAL ADVISOR TO KARNATAKA STATE POLICE HOUSING CORPORATION, BANGALORE. HE BELONGS TO INDIAN POSTAL SERVICE (1991).