If ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was one of the most recognized – and beloved – works of his literary production, perhaps as fate would have it, the Colombian writer died on Holy Thursday, ten years ago, just like Úrsula Iguarán, one of the key fictional characters of this novel and inspired by her maternal grandmother.
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1927 – but who lived, wrote and died in Mexico – had been raised by his maternal grandparents, characters who marked his life: his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez was a veteran of the Thousand Days War, and the future writer’s umbilical cord between reality and fiction. While his grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán, was a source of inspiration with his fables and family stories, in that magical and superstitious vision of reality that he would later capture as a writer.
The fascinating thing about this universal Colombian is that he not only lives in reality but also elevates it to the subconscious, unleashes taboos, superstitions, ghosts, myths and cosmogonies “that we Caribbean people carry inside” – said García Márquez -, and makes us confront the past, present and future living with our ghosts, ancestors and descendants.
In one of his interviews Gabo even said, “critics build theories around this and see things that I had not seen. They respond only to our lifestyle, the life of the Caribbean. There is not a line in my novels that is not based on reality.”
He began his law career, studies that he abandoned for what he confessed was his “first and only vocation, journalism,” but he has gone down in history for being the father of what was called magical realism, and the only Colombian one. The universal writer whom all humanity confesses to having read with pleasure won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
A literary career that began with ‘La Hojarasca’ in 1955 and concluded in 2004 with ‘Memorias de mis putas tristes’, and an unpublished work that will be published by his heirs.
One hundred years of solitude
It is always said that Faulkner is the writer who left the greatest mark on García Marquéz, especially in the way he narrated the stories that he later seasoned with what came to be called magical realism and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ – the Colombian’s capital novel published on 5 June 1967 -, in an imaginary and already mythical town – Macondo – where the improbable and magical is no less real than the everyday with which it blends and coexists with total naturalness.
A novel whose first single paragraph already moves us, it can be said that the entire novel is there, in that initial paragraph the germ of its development, which converts the novel into the expansive waves of that first paragraph, something that only it does.
His contribution to literature? The first would be a world that we had not really seen despite having it so close and with a great capacity, a great narrative quality to capture the readers with just a few lines. García Márquez’s prose has images that remain with you because they are very strong and that is part of the fabric of his writing, which always provokes a joyful reading that has magnet and invites you to continue getting into his world.
The second would be that use of language where he combines the scholarly with the everyday and vulgar (following in the wake of Cervantes in Don Quixote, that work that he found extremely boring the first time he read it) One Hundred Years of Solitude, where even the vulgar combines with the most sublime and fanciful of its magical realism… His descriptions are unmatched and although his sentences can last an entire page, we read them with devotion. As Neruda stated, One Hundred Years of Solitude was “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Cervantes’ Don Quixote.”
‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, his most recognized, remembered – and loved – work of his literary production, perhaps fate wanted the Colombian writer to die on Holy Thursday, just like Úrsula Iguarán, one of the fictional characters, one of the keys to this novel, which is inspired by Tranquilina Iguarán, his grandmother, an important woman in his life, with a great imagination and very superstitious.
Gabo had established his residence in Mexico and worked as a correspondent for the Prensa Latina agency in the United States, where he received both threats and criticism. One Hundred Years of Solitude was written in Mexico at the end of 1964, when he was traveling with his family to Acapulco and inspiration struck: “like a revelation, I found exactly the tone I needed. And the tone was to tell it the way my grandmother told things. Because I remember that my grandmother told the most fantastic things, and she told it in a tone so natural, so simple, that it was completely convincing. And then I didn’t get to Acapulco. “I came back and sat down to write One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
A novelist with a vocation as a journalist
A novelist, clear, precise, forceful, who writes with simplicity, transparency and almost poetic rhythm, also with the naturalness of that journalist who was, “my great and only vocation, was journalism” – as he himself confessed -, published a long list of titles such as ‘The General in his Labyrinth’, ‘The Colonel Has No One to Write to Him’, ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, ‘Of Love and Other Demons’, ‘News of a kidnapping’ or ‘Live to tell it’, a memoir-like book where all the characters, themes and places of his novels are identified. Since his grandmother Tranquilina was always worried about the retirement check that his grandfather was due and that never arrived, and his grandfather, the colonel has no one to write to him. That’s why he went so far as to say that he had never written a line that didn’t come from reality.
Gabo let us see the world, its reality, in a different way. The well-known world of dictators, for example, with a different focus, where old dictators, with or without power, suffer from illnesses and are vulnerable, they age and the only thing they hope is to have a check in their hand at the end of the month to cope with old age, the one that reduces us all.
It has been 20 years since the last novel in his life was published, “Memoria de mis putas tristes” where he transforms a sordid and hated subject (an old living and womanizing man who falls in love with a teenager, a virgin) into something more tender, again pure magical realism. The old man cries for his lost youth, his loneliness and the oblivion of the now, his wasted life without knowing true love, a life that, as an old man, changes thanks to the girl, through whom he redeems himself. That is the beauty of the book, how the girl’s innocence has the power to transform the lustful old man into a kind of knight defending impossible ideals.
However, the legacy of the original author from Aracataca, Colombia, did not end there. After reviewing a novel that García Marquéz discarded, perhaps because he already had Alzheimer’s, the family considered that the drafts contained the essence of the captivating writer. And finally it was edited for publication as a posthumous novel “In August See You”, “the book that did not end but did not destroy either.
As a writer – says his son Rodrigo García Barcha – he probably would not have wanted it to be published because he was very demanding, and it took him a while to give approval, but it was also a book on which he worked for many years, too many for him not to see the light, perhaps because as he was suffering from the Alzheimer’s process, he worked on several versions and the last time he read it he thought that the book made no sense, perhaps because he had already lost his faculties. On the other hand, we also know that he would understand our reasons for publishing it, being who he was, a novel where a woman was the protagonist, its readers deserve this work in the opinion of those who have read and valued it.
Amalia Gonzalez Manjavacas
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