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| Gabriel García Márquez |
The gift of Gabo
Christopher Tayler enjoys the adventures of Latin America's most popular and colourful novelist
Christopher Tayler
Saturday 22 November 2008
T
his fairly long book - a scaled-down version of an even longer one, Gerald Martin reveals - begins with an appropriately large claim about its subject. Martin thinks that Gabriel García Márquez might be the only novelist from the second half of the last century who's as respected all over the world as the giants of the first half. This initially seems like routine biographer's hype. By the time Martin has finished detailing the awe-inspiring extent of García Márquez's renown, it seems more like English understatement.
In 1996, for example, a group calling itself the Movement for the Dignity of Colombia kidnapped a senior politician's brother, demanding that García Márquez take over the country's presidency. (Their victim was eventually released unharmed.) When the novelist's memoir of his early life was published in 2001, Hugo Chávez produced a copy during his weekly television broadcast, urging all Venezuelans to read it. Chávez, unlike Bill Clinton, François Mitterrand, Felipe González, Fidel Castro and most Latin American presidents since the 1970s, wasn't even a personal friend: Vicente Fox of Mexico, by contrast, had got his copy from the author's hands. Clinton showed up at what was effectively García Márquez's 80th birthday party, as did five Colombian presidents and the king of Spain. Castro marked his comrade's winning of the Nobel prize in 1982 by buying him a supply of caviar in Moscow on the way back from Brezhnev's funeral.
Gabo, as he's universally known in the many countries where he's a household name, also has a broad fan base among the less temporally powerful. Even his fiercest critics generally agree that One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the central Latin American novel of the 20th century. "Magical realism" - which Martin defines as writing "through the worldview of the characters themselves without any indication from the author that this worldview is quaint, folkloric or superstitious" - has become a standard part of the repertoire for writers struggling to fit experience of the developing world into the inherited forms of the European novel. And García Márquez is a genuinely popular novelist, with a large non-intellectual following and, in Latin America, the added status of a local hero. In 1982, a Colombian journalist asked a street prostitute if she'd heard about Gabo's Nobel. Yes, she replied, a client had just told her about it in bed.
García Márquez was 40 when celebrity on this unrepeatable scale descended on him soon after the publication of his best-known novel. Before One Hundred Years of Solitude came out, he was a relatively minor player in the 60s boom of Latin American fiction. Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa were the names to watch, and although his four previous books had been admired by the handful of people who'd read them, García Márquez was having a hard time with his writing. He was working part-time at an advertising agency in Mexico City when, in 1965, on a drive to the coast, the opening lines of his masterpiece floated into his brain. The following year was spent sequestered in his study in a haze of cigarette smoke, and when he emerged with the completed manuscript, he had a pretty good idea of where his career was headed.
As García Márquez has always made clear, and as Martin shows in exhaustive detail, his earlier struggles at his desk weren't caused by a lack of material. His principal breakthrough in Mexico City lay in finding a way to address the stories he'd been carrying around for all of his working life. Born in 1927 to an army veteran's daughter and a handsome yet feckless telegraphist, the future writer spent the first eight years of his life being brought up by his grandparents in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia's Caribbean coast. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, was filled with stories of his service in the civil conflict known as the War of a Thousand Days; he had also killed a man in dubiously romantic circumstances. The colonel's wife, Tranquilina, saw ghosts and portents everywhere. "Shit," Gabito thought when he read Kafka's "Metamorphosis" a few years later, "that's just the way my grandmother talked."
Colombia's blood-soaked politics was on vivid display from early on. Aracataca had enjoyed a wild west-style boom when an American banana company came to the region, but the town went into decline after 1928, when troops massacred striking plantation workers. Outrage over these events led to a brief spell of power for a less reactionary government, which founded a model school in Zipaquirá to which García Márquez eventually won a scholarship. From there he moved into journalism and short-story writing under the cover of legal studies, soaking up the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf under the guidance of a literary circle in Barranquilla. Meanwhile, "La Violencia" - a low-level civil war played out in rural areas - tightened its grip. Disheartened by the censorship regime, and perhaps fearing that the lives of leftwing journalists weren't worth all that much to the Bogotá elite, García Márquez left for Europe in 1955.
Martin tracks his adventures on both sides of the iron curtain, his hand-to-mouth existence in Paris, his stint working for the Cuban cause in New York and his years in Mexico with heroic determination. The same quality is much in evidence in Martin's efforts to untangle his family history and the intricate ongoing narrative of Colombian politics. There's a strong emphasis on García Márquez's identity as a man of the coast rather than the Andean uplands inhabited by Colombia's dominant classes. From early on, he took his cultural bearings from the Caribbean and Faulkner's North America; his wider Latin American consciousness was nurtured by the cultural ferment he found in Mexico, where he belatedly discovered the work of such older contemporaries as Juan Rulfo, whose novel Pedro Páramo (1955) he claimed to have learned by heart in the years leading up to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Post-fame, the writer's life inevitably becomes more opaque. Martin has no definitive explanation of why Vargas Llosa, a former friend, punched García Márquez in the face in 1976. He also admits defeat when it comes to fathoming his subject's marriage to Mercedes Barcha, his wife since 1958, commenting ruefully that they are "very ironic and very private people". García Márquez's high-profile activism since the 70s means that politics increasingly dominates the story, and Martin can't help sounding a bit dismayed by some of it. The novelist is clearly drawn to men of power, but there's little evidence that he ever exercised much influence over them, and while his closeness to Castro has made him a hate figure for much of the Latin American right, he seems to have made his peace with the region's elites. The people of Venezuela, for instance, weren't impressed when he defended a disgraced outgoing president by praising his "magnificent sense of friendship".
Most of the time, though, Martin's tone is unfailingly, almost comically admiring - an impressive testimony to Gabo's charm given that the biographer has spent 17 years researching this book. He seems to have interviewed the entire extended family as well as García Márquez, Mercedes, Castro and every politician in Colombia. In the process he has been mythologised himself. "I have found it quite impossible," he writes, "to kill off the myth which García Márquez himself has disseminated, to the effect that I . . . once spent a rain-drenched night on a bench in the square at Aracataca in order to 'soak up the atmosphere' of the town." His asides on his subject's love of "ghastly multicoloured shirts" only add to the book's eccentric appeal, as do his translations of remembered dialogue, in which everyone sounds like a 1930s mobster. ("If after that the other guy turns out to be a louse," Castro growls at one point, "that's another problem.")
Martin is also extremely knowledgeable about Latin American literature in general, providing context and enthusiastic critical analysis of the kind that usually gets lost in a scoop of this size. "Don't worry," García Márquez told him while refusing to discuss a former girlfriend, "I will be whatever you say I am." In this respect, the novelist chose his life-writer wisely. "Oh well," he apparently said when Martin's name came up, "I suppose every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer."