Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 - 2014 

 

During the latter stages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character returns from the dead. His reason? Loneliness. 

 

Whilst that in itself is a funny and sharply insightful remark, it almost feels like a sleight of hand trick to deceive the most intelligent of readers. Ignoring the metaphorical intent for a moment, consider: a man returns from death, and no one really bats an eyelid when he provides an explanation.

 

The novel is stuffed with clever allusions which are partly illusory in this way - how Garcia Marquez managed to build a state of normality out of the strangest happenings is the book's foundation, and was probably created from two founts - his grandmother, whose deadpan style is recounted in Saldivar Dasso's Garcia Marquez: Journey From The Seeds.

 

The second comes from history itself and there's no doubt a man of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wit noticed that the fuenta of his novel could be taken from numerous streams of life. The banana massacre, one of the very few episodes laced with anger venomous wit, actually happened in 1928 in Ciénaga, Colombia.  

 

In this novel, death, like everything else, is treated simply as an event in a circular existence, and it feels now as though, particularly with regards to mortality, Garcia Marquez was writing about the novel itself as well as the history of his country and its inhabitants. David Nicholson's 1970 review makes clear how the novel was considered to be on its uppers in the in the decade, and there's a revealing chapter in Gore Vidal's Selected Essays which reveals the newly created chasms in reading habits of east coast Americans via the NY Times bestseller list.

In short, a very rapid advancement in media, television had done for much of contemporary literature - or so it was thought. It's particularly ironic that the autocratic governments popping up all over South America contrived to produce some of the most joyous and freethinking writing seen in the 20th century, including the Kerouacs et al of the 50s.

Marquez had been at the forefront of that vanguard, working as a journalist in Barranquilla and then Caracas, Venezuela as a columnist and the principal reason for the near-airless gap between him and his characters throughout his career is surely down to these formative years. Through sheer practice, Marquez had become the writer's writer.

 

One Hundred Years is the only Nobel-winning book I've read more than once. On a sliding scale of 'chore' to 'joy to read', the latter is definitely the permanent resting place for this book. I first read the book before going to university and at the time enjoyed the stories for their ridiculous natures.

 

I read it again aged 21 after graduating and then I enjoyed the subtexts; having three years of looking at the ingredients, not the cake, had really changed my outlook to all sorts of literature, and I became a bit of a snob for it.

 

Describing my thoughts now, I still love the same things about the book but age - I'm 30 this year - has helped me marry the dual elements above through reading a larger array of books, from pop culture through to inscrutably weird. That cyclical journey, that on the face has no overtly changed from 12 years ago - is an enduring reason of my love for Marquez's finest work; because, at the end, I can relate to what he is saying, and why he is saying it.

Picture thanks to PicLab

Thoughts on Orhan Pamuk

A really fascinating guy to chew over when you've got absolutely nothing else to be concerned about.

The Complete Stories by Truman Capote: A Review

I nearly called this The Truman Show. I just couldn't go through with it. Sorry everyone.
 
Reynolds Price's introduction to the Modern Classic version of Truman Capote's Complete stories thrusts the diminutive Southern gentleman alongside the globetrotting bar-room aficionado and occasional war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. When I think of what I know about Hemingway and how busy he seemed, all the damn time, Capote is not a comparative figure in my mind's eye. He's just a very intelligent guy who had a fine eye for detail and character and spun woozily evocative yarns around his upbringing and New York living.

And yet I hugely prefer his careful, refined style, not effete as such but deeply interested in a feminine way for me. Capote's style seems perverse in streaks; never asexual but capable of occupying both genders in back to back tales.

The cover is a charmer; a precious young Truman stares intensely into a camera, wispy fringe combed across freckled brow and his clear blue eyes fix you in your place as a cigarette stub dangles from fingers that it feels insulting to describe as lithe, because it's a lazy term and this man would never appreciate slothliness in word or wit.

Twenty vignettes set all over America make up this collection, ranging as far south as Texas and as far north as New York. He's a writer I've always seen in New York thanks to his toothy personality, a fetish for etiquette and an alleged amphetamine habit that would stop Hemingway's bull in Pamplona. And indeed most of my favourite tales, including the exquisitely sinister Miriam and the famous Headless Hawk, are set in that snowflaked city.

As a Southerner, his taste and touch for gothic is refined and seems to possess an ancient wisdom. Elmore Leonard once advised aspiring writers never to describe the weather 'just because it's there': sound advice, and Capote's landscapes creep around their subjects almost tenderly. He has a particular talent for the night. 'Tall trees, misty, painted pale by malicious moonshine towered steep on either side without a break or clearing', make for an oppressive backdrop in A Tree Of Night, a sinister story of a lonely young woman travelling alongside a freak show compere and her savant partner, (relationship never clarified).

Like the sticky Southern heat Capote grew up in, the writing is regularly uncomfortably close to the skin. A surgical knife seems to hovers over each character, trimming and distilling a cast of dozens with a few short, sharp strokes. His brutal treatment of Walter Ranney in Shut A Final Door would be shocking if it weren't so unconcerned with itself, instead annotating his pain with merciless aestheticism via a silent hand. And it seems no background, age or indeed culture is beyond his tender grip. The writing feels amazingly tactile, like it had shook hands with its creations and perhaps sat down for coffee before committing their existence to paper.

Preacher's Legend depicts a decrepit Negro in semi-glorious senility, having finally made his peace with his unseen God in the woods near his shack home. Capote's forensic style lifts the tale off the page here - -it's commonplace to point out the inherent hazards involved with a creation of this broadness and contemporary whims would doubtless cause a younger writer to ironically stretch further than Capote probably did in his depiction. Instead what's captured is almost bitterly honest and gently funny in its exposure of loneliness and the beliefs that gather, like dust, in the spaces between living.

What really stands out is his almost tender appraisal of the most subtle of emotional changes in his characters throughout - I imagined him combing his delicate fingers through that fine hair as he stripped and planed for the depth and dimension that's so insistent in his style. The omniscient position he assumed at the hub of East Coast society in the Fifties and Sixties no doubt played into the development of his style and there's equally no doubt of the relationship each held throughout the author's professional life.

But the most fascinating aspect of all of this was considering where the man drew his abilities from; paradoxically his social nature, his known propensity for gossip and discussion of those around him enabled him to draw on deep wells of understanding of human character that a more reserved individual would never have access to. That alone is not a talent, but these stories feel as fresh today as they did fifty years ago. The man himself would surely tell you that that is a price worth paying.


Pictures courtesy of Penguin.com