My friend and fellow blogger Cristina reminds the world that today is the birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the post is in Portuguese, with translation via Babelfish). If there is a more beautiful, lush author on the planet, please point me to that person. I will admit I am a latecomer to Garcia Marquez, having read One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera only in the past couple years, but all I can say is, if you have not availed yourself, please do yourself a favor, find these books, read them, and your entire literary outlook will change. Every book you ever read ever after will be a disappointment precisely because Garcia Marquez' prose is so beautiful - I almost hesitate to call it perfect - it is a bit like relationships after one's first true love; there will never be another like it, as sweet or as special.
Garcia Marquez started life as a journalist in his native Colombia, gaining fame for his reporting on the survivors of a shipwreck; that story became his first non-fiction work. Going in to exile in Mexico due to Colombia's persistent political upheaval, and his own left-of-center views, he first imagined Solitude after thinking about the stories his grandmother used to tell. The phrase "magical realism" has often been used to describe this particular novel, but such an idiotic phrase means little, and actually misses the point. The novel, both as it unfolds and in its original conception, is nothing more or less than a series of folk tales, and as Garcia Marquez tells it, elements of the fantastic and the realistic were so interwoven in the stories he remembered from his grandmother that he decided to keep that flavor as he wrote the novel. While sad, even poignant, especially as the novel ends, it is filled with characters both lovable and believable, even with all the strange and fantastic events that fill their lives.
Love in the Time of Cholera is, as the author said in an interview he gave (I think it was Playboy but don't quote me) after the publication, an ode to his parents. I remember quite vividly reading how, as he read the first draft, he wept because he had not realized how deeply his own parents' story was interwoven into the plot of the novel. Again, do yourself a favor, and read this marvelous, wondrous tale of love that is stronger than all the vicissitudes of life and personality and even hatred.
For those who might not like Garcia Marquez because he is a communist sympathizer, I just want to note that, along with him and other left-leaning authors, I also happen to like the poetry of that fascist-loving traitor to the United States (actually, that is only technically true; he avoided prosecution on an insanity defense, and spent years in St. Elizabeth's hospital in the US until exiled back to the Italy he loved) Ezra Pound. Another extremist I happen to like, I guess.
