I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard, or read, someone say something like what the author of the March 6/2024 BBC article says of García Márquez, that he was “was best known for pioneering the magical realist style of writing.”
That all started with his first and, in the English-speaking world, most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, with the levitating priest, the butterflies following someone around, etc. When one American journalist told him how he adored the ‘magic realism’, García Márquez impatiently interrupted him, saying “The book is about solitude.” The ‘magic realism’ was intended to be no more than an entertaining side-show.
Whenever I think about this, I remember what Canadian author Morley Callaghan, a friend of Ernest Hemingway since they worked together at the Toronto Star, said Hemingway told him – “Remember this Morley – whenever they praise you, it’s always for the wrong thing.”
García Márquez was a fan of Polish/British author Joseph Conrad, who famously wrote, “We live as we dream – alone.” There are many echoes of Conrad in García Márquez’s books. He said solitude/aloneness was the theme, not just in One Hundred Years, but also in his first novel, Leaf Storm, in Nobody Writes to the Colonel, and in, what he considered his most important book, Autumn of the Patriarch.
So now we’re told that there is a book he had more or less completed before his death in 2014 – Until August – which is going to be published this week, ten years later.
As for the controversy over whether it should be published, since its author requested that it be destroyed, the world would be worse off if all such books were left unpublished. If a famous author wants something to not be published, he or she should destroy it himself – like Dickens burning his diaries. Otherwise it’s going to be published one day.
What I find intriguing, is that García Márquez is said to have struggled with dementia as he was writing it. No doubt that was detrimental, but should keep it in mind that those who struggle against dementia are heroes. My wife suffered from Alzheimer’s for at least 6 years, yet even towards the end she had lucid moments, and despite other disabilities compounding her suffering, I could sometimes make her laugh.
And so I’m looking forward to this new, and last, book of Gabriel García Márquez.
Alan Conrad 