87 Years Of Solitude
87 Years Of Solitude
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ WON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN ‘MAGICAL REALISM’ ANYMORE
Novelist Gabriel García Márquez died Thursday in Mexico City at the age of 87; he was one of the giants of modern literature, with a 1982 Nobel Prize and one undisputed classic, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that most people think of when they think of “magical realism” — and even if that term maybe gets over-used with other Latin American writers, it’s a fair cop for García Márquez. Weird stuff happens, and it’s just part of the everyday strangeness of life in his fiction — and besides, how weird is a levitating priest compared to the reality of South American politics and history? Also, he wrote one of the best first paragraphs of any novel:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 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 prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
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And of course there’s the idiotic U.S. ban on García Márquez, so that he wouldn’t be able to taint our innocent country with his dangerous leftist ideas and support for Cuba (except, of course, through his writing, but you if can’t punish books, at least you can beat up on the writer). There’s one more thing to thank Bill Clinton for: that travel ban was lifted in 1995 and Clinton invited García Márquez to visit him in Martha’s Vineyard.
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"The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point," I was intrigued. When Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia, who are cousins, marry, but she refuses to sleep with her husband because she's afraid that they will have a child with a pig's tail, her husband says, "I don't care if I have piglets as long as they can talk." And later: "If you bear iguanas, we'll raise iguanas."
