The Miraculous Life of Gabriel Garca Mrquez
When Gabriel Garca Mrquez was born, in 1927, in the sleepy little town of Aracataca, not far from Colombia's Caribbean coast, there were certain established fixities in the world of letters. The centers of gravity were Europe and North America, with a few auxiliary poles in Wellington, perhaps, or Kolkata. The novel, just beginning to be shaken up by Joyce and Woolf, told mainly of carriages moving under birch trees and conversations on rainy boulevards. Its characters, as often as not, were the people you might meet at dinner parties thrown for Count Tolstoy or Marcel Proust. By the time Garca Mrquez died at 87 on April 17, all that had changed, and largely because of him. A new continent had been discovered, so it seemed, rich with tamarind trees and "pickled iguana," and folk cultures everywhere had an epic voice. Villagers could be imagined seeking daguerreotypes of God, and men arriving on doorsteps amid a halo of yellow butterflies. Macondo, a never-never town of almond trees and "banana wars" a lot like Aracataca had become as much a part of the reader's neighborhood as Yoknapatawpha County or St. Petersburg. The story behind this was, of course, half-miraculous. The eldest of 11 children, "Gabo," as he was universally called, was born to a telegraph operator and a colonel's daughter. When his parents moved to another city in search of work, he was left behind, a tropical Pip, to spend his early years with relatives. From his grandfather, he heard tales of fatal duels and his country's unending civil wars from his aunts and grandmother, he absorbed all the spells and spirits sovereign in a world in which Arab and Indian and African cultures mixed. Scarcely was he out of his teens than the boy was publishing short stories in a newspaper, while studying law with a view to help the disenfranchised. The newspaper for which he also wrote columns was called  too perfectly  El Universal. One day, after 18 months of continuous writing, he completed a book, his fifth, so large that his wife Mercedes had to pawn her hair dryer and an electric heater to pay for postage to send it to the publisher. Cien Aos de Soledad was published in 1967 such was the interest in Latin writing then that it did not even make it into English till three years later, and Pablo Neruda, South America's reigning Nobel laureate, pronounced it "perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." He could as easily have called it a narrative Alhambra, a palace in the Spanish tradition but fluent with foreign shapes and dizzy curlicues amid the water and the orange trees.