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January 25, 2004
Review: The making of a novelist
IT is a commonplace of literary criticism that no writer is equal to his book. In fact according to Faulkner, a writer’s life is quite irrelevant to his work. Not so in case of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose bestseller memoir Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para Contarla) vividly demonstrates that it was precisely his precocious childhood surrounded by a large eccentric family that made him a writer of novels.
For Marquez like Proust to write is to remember. Stringing his sentences with words which are more like pearls as beautiful as one can imagine, this masterpiece of a memoir narrates the struggles of the artist as a young man, who against the wishes of his parents wanted to become a writer. As always this book is poetically rendered from Spanish into English by longtime Marquez translator Edith Grossman.
Living to Tell the Tale is part one of a trilogy that Marquez plans to write. It begins in the 1950’s but meanders back and forth to his childhood days in the 1930’s.
As a young journalist from the Caribbean coast of Colombia, he lived a life of dire poverty in Bogota, the distant mountainous political and literary capital of Colombia which was not too friendly to him as a ‘costegno’ (or coastal person). When his first story appeared in the national daily, El Espectador he did not even have five centavos to purchase a copy.
The memoir begins with a journey that Marquez undertook with his mother back to the Caribbean village of Aracataca where he was born, to help her sell their ancestral dilapidated house. This Conrad-like heart-of-darkness journey through the swamps of the Magdalena river takes us back to Marquez’s magic world of Macondo, the mythic town of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
As we know that novel won him the Nobel Prize in 1982. It can best be described as an epic poem of an earthly paradise of desolation and nostalgia and seems to have been born during that journey to his ancestral village: “The first thing that struck me when we arrived in Aracataca was the silence. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through an undulating glass. My mother remained in her seat for a few more minutes, looking at the dead town laid out along empty streets, and at last she exclaimed in horror: ‘My God.’”
All of us have read memoirs sometimes full of boring self-indulgence but Marquez’s work is a rare specimen of a writer dealing honestly and intimately with his past. Now 76 years old as he looks back, he is surprised how he survived the loneliness, the whoring and drinking and smoking of 60 cigarettes a day: “I was convinced my bad luck was congenital and irremediable, above all with women and with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did not need good luck to write well. I did not care about glory or money or old age, because I was sure I was going to die very young, and in the street.”
As is self evident, Marquez writes his memoirs with the simplicity, serenity and ease that are the hallmarks of a master. He read Faulkner’s Light in August and Joyce’s Ulysses. These novels “provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structure in my books.”
He writes that Kafka not only cast a spell on him but taught him that “it was not necessary to demonstrate facts... ‘Metamorphosis’ in a Borges translation was Scheherazade all over again, not in her millenary world where everything was possible but in another irreparable world where everything had already been lost.”
After he read The Thousand and One Nights, Marquez says he learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to re-read them.
Turning to his life as a young man he says he had two addictions: smoking and sex. Here is how he narrates, with a chuckle, an adventure with a policeman’s wife: “I remember her first name was Nigromanta... she had an Abyssinian profile and cocoa skin. Her bed was joyful... and she had an instinct for love that seemed to belong more to a turbulent river than to a human being. Her husband had the body of a giant and the voice of a little girl... and he had a bad reputation of killing liberals.”
Among other tales of people, journalist colleagues and places, the memoir also narrates in detail a first hand account of the traumatic assassination of the Colombian hero and Presidential candidate Gaitan in Bogota on April 9, 1948. It was a horrific event that started a civil war between the rich and the poor in Colombia which lasts to the present day. Incidentally, on that fateful day both Fidel Castro, a young leftist from Cuba and US secretary of state, George Marshall, were both present in Bogota. Writes Marquez: “I believe that on April 9, 1948 the 20th century began in Colombia.”
For someone who has lived both in Pakistan and Colombia, I find striking parallells in the histories of these two countries. There is an uncanny resemblance in the politics and numerous other details of the Gaitan and Liaquat Ali assassinations in that cold war era. The onset of civil war in Colombia in 1948 caused a similar widespread bloodshed just as the Partition unleashed human slaughter in the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
What appears fantastical in the novels of Garcia Marquez such as the hallucinatory town of Macondo “where flowers sometimes fell from the sky in place of rain” and “swamps thick with lilies oozed blood when you hacked them with machetes” is in fact a normal description of much of the third world in our times.
Reviewer’s email: javedamir@hotmail.com
Living to Tell the Tale
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN 1-4000-4134-1
496pp. $26.95
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