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. |
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