The Hindu Business Line : This magic is for real

Supplanted firmly on the ground, but driven by oodles of magical imagery — Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories have ignited the minds of a million readers. Perhaps the father of the literary style magical realism, this noteworthy 20th Century author has always told a tale within a tale, making it difficult for readers to take a break between chapters, leave alone pages.

One Hundred Years of Solitude — the fictionalised novel based on his family history — was what gave him not only global recognition, but even won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The story, set in the fictional South American village Macondo, navigates through many generations of the Buendía family, tracing their struggles and hardships.

Though Leaf Storm was Marquez’s first novella, typical of the publishing industry, it took him seven years to have it published in 1955. An all-time favourite with the author also, for he felt it was “his most sincere and honest” work, the story delved into a child’s first-time encounter with death.

Death, in fact, seems to have held the author’s fascination in most of his works. Many of them begin with a burial, a funeral or set in a graveyard. Love in the Time of Cholera, easily Marquez’s best work and another that has provided him critical acclaim far and wide, too begins with death, the scent of bitter almonds and the fumes of gold cyanide. A love story with a difference, it is based on the story of two couples. The love quotient in the story is said to be inspired by the love between Marquez’s parents, who faced the family wrath before they tied the knot. However, the tale itself is supposed to be based on a newspaper story about the death of two 80-year-old Americans who were in love and met clandestinely every year in Acapulco. They were out in a boat one day and were murdered by the boatman with his oars. The author, talking about the story, once explained, “Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known. I was fascinated by them. They were each married to other people.”

Though Marquez drew on his parents’ experience in Love in the Time of Cholera, the primary influences that shaped his life, thoughts and politics to quite an extent were his grandparents. The author was raised by his maternal grandparents in his early childhood. To his grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Ricardo Marquez, the author has attributed the shaping of his political and literary perspective. Marquez has spoken about his grandfather at length in a published interview: “My grandfather the Colonel was a liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government,” he had recalled.

Later, Márquez was to be known for his socialist and anti-imperialist views. That is the other side to the author. Though he started out as a journalist and that was an integral part of his identity, his fictional work that was translated into English is what gave him recognition across the globe.

However, his early journalistic career began while he was studying law. He wrote for several newspapers such as El Universal, El Heraldo and later El Espectador and El Independiente. He was also an active member of a small group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that is supposed to have been the inspirational backbone of his literary career. In 1994, along with his brother Jaime and with lawyer Jaime Abello, he founded the New Iberoamerican Journalism Foundation, which was to help young journalists learn with teachers such as Alma Guillermoprieto or Jon Lee Anderson, so that the profession would get a fresh lease of life.

So, as several literary critics have pointed out, a lot of Marquez’s fiction was rooted in the journalist in him. But where did the ‘magic’ in his writings come from? The magic, as it were, is attributed to his maternal grandmother, who gave to Marquez a thirst for the unbelievable. About grandmother Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, the author has said in an interview, “she treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural, was the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality.” He has been quoted as recalling her unique way of telling a tale and “filling the house with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents, all of which were studiously ignored by her husband.”

And as Marquez’s magic realism lives on, so do the yarns that he spins for us. The Chronicle of a Death Foretold retells the story of the murder of protagonist Santiago Nasar. While who did it is revealed right at the start, the book keeps you hooked to find out why. The novel was also adapted into a film by Italian director Francesco Rosi in 1987.

In 1999, Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, but chemotherapy proved to be successful, and the illness went into remission. Since then he has written a few works, including his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale. His most recent novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is again a love story with a difference — between a 90-year-old man and a pubescent concubine.

Though it has been reported that Márquez has declared that he has “finished with writing” and recently his agent claimed that the author is unlikely to write again, the informal buzz that he is finishing a new novel of love is, nevertheless, keeping his fans in waiting mode.