There is an unofficial branch of journalism I call ‘author interviews’. Whenever I spot one on a novelist, I have to check it out.
The best source I’ve found is the “Last Interview and Other Conversations” series put out by Melville Publishing. If you don’t know about these marvellous little books, let me introduce you. Each one has several interviews with the author in question, ending with the last one done before their death. They include journalists, musicians, artists, actors, etc.
I’ve read those for Hemingway, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, J.D. Salinger, Ray Bradbury, and one more that I’m going to tell you about. But each of those that I have read has been an unexpected treasure chest from the past.
My apologies for the lack of women. The series includes many women, but only two woman novelists as far as I can tell – Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison, who I haven’t got to yet.
The Last Interview – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Other Conversations, published in 2015, might be my favorite. Márquez (born: March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Columbia – death: April 17, 2014, age 87, in Mexico City) can stop you in your tracks with his outside-the-box statements.
Here I’m going to give you a bit of an interview by Columbian journalist and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, which has been added to the Last Interview book from Mendoza’s 1983 biography of Marquez, The Fragrance of the Guava.
In the English-speaking world Marquez is famous for his 1967 break-out novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though it made him famous and brought him financial independence, Márquez said more than once that he’d grown to hate the book. Here is their conversation about that:
M: “It’s very odd that you never mention One Hundred Years of Solitude among your best books when many critics consider it unsurpassable. Do you really feel so bitter about it?”
GM: “Yes I do. It nearly ruined my life. Nothing was ever the same again after it was published.”
M: “Why?”
GM: “Because fame unsettles your sense of reality, almost as much as power perhaps, and it continually threatens your private life. Unfortunately, nobody believes this until they have to put up with it.”
M: “Is it that you feel the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude is unfair to the rest of your work?”
GM: “Yes, it’s unfair. The Autumn of the Patriarch is a much more important literary achievement . But whereas it is about the solitude of power, One Hundred Years of Solitude is about the solitude of everyday life. It’s everybody’s life story. Also, it’s written in a simple, flowing, linear, and I’d even say (I’ve said it before), superficial way.”
M: “You seem to despise it.”
GM: “No, but since I knew it was written with all the tricks and artifices under the sun, I knew I could do better even before I wrote it.”
So according to Marquez, if you want to read his best book, you should read Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca). Unfortunately it’s one I haven’t yet read. The back cover of the English hard-copy edition says it “vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictatorship.”
Alan Conrad 