Books of solitude – The Hindu

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose birthday was on March 6, the theme of all his works is solitude, of power, relationships and everyday life

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose birthday was on March 6, the theme of all his works is solitude, of power, relationships and everyday life

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez sat down to write his breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), he wanted to find a way of expressing in literature all the experiences which had influenced him as a child. In his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, and also in his conversations with his friend and contemporary Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza ( The Fragrance of Guava), Marquez says Solitude draws word images of his childhood which, was spent in a large, very sad house with a sister who ate earth, a grandmother who prophesied the future, and countless relatives of the same name who never made much distinction between happiness and insanity.

Born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, Marquez worked as a journalist for years before turning to writing. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he passed away in 2014 after suffering from dementia. Earlier this year, it was reported that Marquez had a secret daughter with a Mexican journalist. As new readers discover Marquez, his origins, craft, work, views on women and politics, through his books (he wrote over 15 works, including novels, short stories, and non-fiction) and interviews, its pertinent to ask how has the story of the Buendias he traces in Solitude endured so long? What pulls us to a narrative filled with men of folly, who are into alchemy and audacious wars, and women who have better sense? His biographer Gerald Martin contends that the book may have been set in Aracataca, in mythical Macondo, but Macondo becomes a metaphor for the whole of Latin America a macrocosm contained within a microcosm the local becomes universal.

For Marquez, though Solitude brought him immense fame and glory, it was not his favourite book. Before I wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold, my best novel was Nobody Writes to the Colonel, but in Chronicle I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. In my other books the story took over, the characters took on a life of their own and did whatever they fancied, he told Mendoza. First published in English in 1982, Chronicle is based on the murder of Marquezs friend decades earlier, but like in Solitude, he juxtaposes the personal with the wider social, cultural and political milieu of a particularly violent period in Latin America. Its consciously built as a literary tour-de-force, says his biographer, for implicitly mocking the concept of suspense, the writer announces the death of his character in the first line of the first chapter: On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.

To Marquez, his most important book was The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), the one which might save me from oblivion. It took him 17 years to write about the solitude of power. Set in an unspecified country, its the portrait of a tyrant who dies after being in power for 200 years. The vultures get to him first, stirring up the stagnant time inside the presidential palace, and the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Post-Nobel Prize, one of his most-read books was Love in the Time of Cholera, about love and loss and the essential loneliness of human beings. Asked by Mendoza why the reality in his novels has been called magical realism, Marquez retorted: This is simply because rationalism prevents people from seeing that reality isnt limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs. Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things.

The magical reality followed Marquez right till the end. He passed away on a Thursday, the day a bird hit a glass wall and died inside Marquezs home. In A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, a tearful tribute to his parents by Rodrigo Garcia, he writes that Marquezs secretary received an email by a reader wanting to know if the family is aware that Ursula Iguaran, the matriarch in Solitude, also died on a Thursday, on a day which was so hot that birds in their confusion were flying into walls and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms.

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Books of solitude - The Hindu