Of Love and Other Demons
by Gabriel García Márquez
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 160
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140256369
Publisher: Penguin USA
The oldest of twelve children, Gabriel García Márquez was born on March
6, 1928, in the small, banana-growing town of Aracataca, Colombia. Like
Fermina and Florentino, the protagonists of his novel Love in the
Time of Cholera, his mother went to high school and studied piano,
and his father, too poor to complete his medical studies, became a telegrapher.
He grew up in the great, gloomy house of his maternal grandparents, raised
on his grandmother's tales of spirits and dead ancestors, and the civil
war stories of his grandfather, a retired colonel.
With a new baby born every
year, there was no money for school tuition, and at thirteen García Márquez
applied for and received a scholarship to a boarding school outside Bogotá.
His teachers recognized a natural storyteller, a gift García Márquez believes
some people are born with. "Some people have a sense of timing, of
organization of facts," he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine
in 1990. "After that, it is a long way to becoming a writer.
You have to learn to write well. It is a technical process, a process
of elaboration and a capacity to elaborate experiences." Though he
would have preferred to study philosophy and letters, García Márquez studied
law at the National University in Bogotá, because the degree was more
practical and the schedule permitted him an afternoon job. He nonetheless
made his way through the great works of literature. Influenced by Marxist
professors and the desperate economic straits of many Latin Americans,
García Márquez became a radical socialist.
By the time the university
closed down in 1948 because of political unrest, García Márquez had sold
several stories to the local newspaper, El Espectador. He left
for Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, where he knew he could find work
on a newspaper. In 1954 he returned to Bogotá to work again for El
Espectador, establishing himself as a well-known journalist. The
next year García Márquez's first book, Leaf Storm, was published
after a seven-year search for a publisher. When his account of the true
story behind the shipwreck of a Colombian naval destroyer displeased Rojas
Pinilla, the Colombian dictator, the newspaper prudently sent him abroad.
Writing short stories all the while, García Márquez worked as a freelance
journalist in Paris, London, and Caracas, and in 1959 opened the Bogotá
office of the Prensa Latina, the newly-created official press
agency of Castro's Cuba. In 1958 he married his childhood sweetheart,
Mercedes Barcha. His first child, Rodrigo, was born in 1959 and his second,
Gonsalvo, in 1962.
A move to Mexico City was followed
by four years in which García Márquez wrote no fiction at all. Then, one
day in January 1965, as he was driving to Acapulco, the complete first
chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude suddenly came to him.
He devoted eight to ten hours a day for eighteen months to his writing,
emerging with a family saga that mirrors the history of Colombia. Published
in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude became an international
bestseller and is considered by many to be his masterpiece.
In 1982 García Márquez won
the Nobel Prize for literature. His other works include four collections
of short stories (No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm,
Innocent Eréndira, and Strange Pilgrims), the novella
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the novels The Autumn
of the Patriarch, In Evil Hour, Love in the Time of
Cholera, and The General in His Labyrinth.
García Márquez lives on the
southern edge of Mexico City, and spends time in Bogotá, Cartagena, Barcelona,
Cuernavaca, and Paris. He tries to write a page a day, declaring it "terribly
hard work, more so all the time. Every letter I write weighs me down,
you can't imagine how much" (Seven Voices). García Márquez
credits the computer for rescuing him from his perfectionist tendencies;
he once went through an entire ream of paper typing the final, letter-perfect
manuscript of a fifteen-page short story.
His leftist beliefs and close
friendship with Fidel Castro have not endeared García Márquez to the U.S.
State Department, which allows him to visit the United States only by
special dispensation. He remains a devoted advocate of human freedom and
is insistent that Europe and the United States should allow Latin America
to develop its own identity - and make its own mistakes - at its own pace
and without intervention. "Why is the originality so readily granted
us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts
at social change?" he demands.
Always looking for the story,
García Márquez still writes occasional pieces of nonfiction. "When
I write journalism, some people think I am writing literature. And I am
very rigorous when I write journalism, very careful of reality,"
he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "But I have a way
of selecting and seeing reality that is very literary.... I see things
others don't." His interest lies in describing and storytelling rather
than in making moral judgments or grand statements. "The writer is
not here to make declarations," he once told his friend Mario Vargas
Llosa, "but to tell about things."
top of the page
In an illuminating 1981 interview with The Paris Review, Mr. García Márquez revealed some of the early influences on his writing. He also discussed inspiration, intuition, imagination, and the relationship between journalism and fiction. Here is an excerpt from that conversation.
Q: How did you start writing?
A: By drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer. When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka: I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. They are totally intellectual short stories because I was writing them on the basis of my literary experience and had not yet found the link between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá and they did have a certain success at the time - probably because nobody in Colombia was writing intellectual short stories. What was being written then was mostly about life in the countryside and social life. When I wrote my first short stories I was told they had Joycean influences.
Q: Had you read Joyce at that time?
A: I had never read Joyce, so I started reading Ulysses. I read it in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing - the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes.
Q: Are dreams ever important as a source of inspiration?
A: In the very beginning I paid a good deal of attention to them. But then I realized that life itself is the greatest source of inspiration and that dreams are only a very small part of that torrent that is life. What is very true about my writing is that I'm quite interested in different concepts of dreams and interpretations of them. I see dreams as part of life in general, but reality is much richer. But maybe I just have very poor dreams.
Q: Can you distinguish between inspiration and intuition?
A: Inspiration is when you find the right theme, one you really like; that makes the work much easier. Intuition, which is also fundamental to writing fiction, is a special quality which helps you to decipher what is real without needing scientific knowledge, or any other special kind of learning. The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It's a way of having experience without having to struggle through it. For a novelist, intuition is essential. Basically it's contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world - in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory. Intuition has the advantage that either it is, or it isn't. You don't struggle to try to put a round peg into a square hole.
Q: Do you think the novel can do certain things that journalism can't?
A: Nothing. I don't think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.
Q: Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?
A: In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
"Gabriel García Márquez" by Peter H. Stone, from Writers at Work, Sixth Series by George A Plimpton, editor. Copyright (c) 1984 by The Paris Review, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
© Copyright 2012 by Gabriel García Márquez. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
