shoogledoogle raises a number of issues:
Where does Márquez fit amidst European and South American literary traditions, what has influenced him, and does he sit more within the works of Cervantes, or his Spanish American peers?
Is there (and can there be, given scant written material from those times) a pre-Columbian element to his works and the Spanish American authors in general?
How does the South American tradition relate and compare to English-language post-colonial writing?
And (finally) where exactly does Márquez stand as regards Borges’ “violin”, especially given the comparative lack of violence (again, especially sexual violence) in Borges’ works, as contrasted with Márquez? Is this purely an issue with Borges’ right wing/centrist politics, and habits of frequenting privileged gentleman’s clubs? Or is it also Marquez’ willingness to deal with something closer to the real, rather than merely subverting with invented references?
Guardian contributor You and I will discuss these questions when we meet on Olympus. But I'm glad you mentioned Borges, whose fingerprints can be seen all over OHYS even though they were in diametrically opposite political and cultural worlds
ChrisTurner1 is wondering about fame and fortune:
I know a major inspiration for Gabo was Juan Rulfo – their works share many similarities. Why then do you think Gabo is still widely celebrated in the English-speaking world but Rulfo has faded into obscurity?
Guardian contributor That's a bit of an exaggeration, Chris. Rulfo is still lionised in Latin America but has never penetrated the Anglo-Saxon world. I've written a few pages on why that is. Gabo got the first line of OHYS from Rulfo.
iromero asks about influence:
Last year I was in the process of reading the fantastic trilogy of novels comprised by ‘The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts’, ‘Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord’ and ‘The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman’ written by Louis de Bernières. I do believe he was highly influenced not only by Magic Realism by also by GGM’s unique style of writing and display of the Latin American idiosyncrasy. As a Mexican, I do feel many traits of my culture and people (good and bad) portrayed in those novels. If you have read them, what are your thoughts on them, and if not, can I strongly recommend them?
Guardian contributor De Bernieres was definitely influenced, directly and indirectly, by GGM. I think he is an excellent, very entertaining writer, though I would have to say that he is an example of what I would call 'Magical Realism Lite'. A bit like 'Agua para chocolate' (not meaning to offend!)
And Ritmos1922 finishes this quickfire interrogation:
How much pantagruelic style are Jose Arcadio Buendia father and son?
Guardian contributor
And again from Ritmos1922:
How much biblical structure and influence do we find in Gabo’s masterpieces?
Guardian contributor
And Ritmos1922 returns with a follow-up:
Is Otono del Patriarca, an Opera Aperta?
Guardian contributor
Ritmos1922 asks:
Is “mierda” a scatologycal leitmotif in Otono del Patriarca?
Guardian contributor Undoubtedly! Of course it’s important to know re the topic of shit that GGM hated gold because he associated the two things. (Your Freudian guess is as good as mine!)
samjordison wants to get personal:
Was it ever strange researching so much about someone you knew so well? Did your opinion of him change as you learned more about him?
Guardian contributor Yes, very strange. But I had been thinking about him for 23 years before I started the bio. Then that took another 17! I was quite anti him before I met him, for all kinds of reasons. He won me over in 5 minutes. Not just because I wanted to write the bio but because he managed to seduce almost everyone one-on-one.
Gabriel García Márquez and magical realism
Jericho999 wants to talk terms:
I’m really interested to know how GGM responded to the term “magical realism”. Was he largely in favour, or did he feel that there were issues / that it imposed limitations?
Guardian contributor Thanks, Jericho, you've done us all a favour! This is the only fully prepared answer I worked out in advance because it was one of the top three questions in the preceding chat but had not yet turned up in this conversation.It's an immensely mmensely complicated and equally controversial matter. At its heart is the question of point of view that I’ve mentioned in other answers. I think it’s far too late to rid ourselves of this label even if we don’t particularly like it, so we have to work with it and through it. The original magical realists (Asturias, Carpentier, Mario de Andrade, etc.) were looking for an answer to how to convey the complexity of Latin America’s historical development and contemporary societies—based on the conflicts between and fusions of the societies of the European invaders and the cultures of the indigenous peoples already there and the Africans transported there later. Simplifying enormously I would say that the key to it is to narrate from the standpoint of the characters, for many of whom the world is, daily, filled with beliefs that they might consider magical but that ‘we’ (contemporary ‘Westerners’—who nevertheless frequently believe that the Old Testament is a history book) perceive as non-scientific, non-realistic, superstitious or simply deluded.
I’d say GGM’s success was due to two aspects among many. First, although magical realism existed long before OHYS (Asturias, Carpentier, Mario de Andrade, etc.), its impact was so explosive and lasting that it will always be associated with GGM and has now turned into a kind of Latin American brand.
Second, GGM’s great achievement was to integrate and fuse many ‘typically’ Latin American characteristics and social and historical myths (newness, solitude, isolation, machismo, sexual exuberance, spontaneity and improvisation, personalism and the dictatorial impulse, love of fiestas and siestas, the poetic urge, musicality, etc.) into one unique work which became an incomparable and unforgettable literary prodfuct.
Of course, there is also GGM’s talent—nay, genius—which is ultimately indefinable and unpredictable.
Thanks again!
iromero asks about Márquez on screen:
Hi! Last year I watch the ‘Gabo’ documentary made by a British woman (unfortunately don’t remember her name now) where she got an interview with ex-president Clinton talking about the appreciation he had towards GGM’s novels and his friendship with him. Can you tell us more about that and how GGM wanted to build bridges with between the U.S. and Cuban governments?
Guardian contributor Kate Horne and Justin Webster. I was in it too--the closest I ever got to Bill Clinton who always had a crisis just when I was supposed to meet him. Too late in the chat for me to give many details but he tried very hard and acted as go-between (Clinton and Castro) on several occasions but the US Senate etc were none too keen.
alwright1 asks:
Are there any personal conflicts that Márquez has reflected in his work? Or, did he ever witness anything that had a personal influence for his work? His work is breathtaking.
Guardian contributor He changed his mind about this almost every year (and anyway he loved to tease the press, who never left him in peace and tended to mainly repeat the same questions). I’d say the books he was proudest of were No One Writes to the Colonel, Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, all for different reasons. I imagine that deep down the answer is really One Hundred Years of Solitude, as it should be, but he never quite said that and what he did say—often—was that it had spoiled his life because it had made him world-famous and people only wanted to talk about that book and its origins and meaning (and its yellow butterflies, etc.) whereas he was a writer endlessly trying to do something new.
mensurrat asks:
What is the story behind, and your opinion of, García Márquez’s last novela: “recuerdo de mis putas tristes”? It was a beautifully written story, but the subject was a bit troubling...why do you think he chose that specific subject?
Guardian contributor This is indeed a troubling question, as you suggest. The wider framework for an answer comes from the traditional Latin American custom of sending adolescent boys to prostitutes so that they will know, later on, ‘how to be men’. More narrowly, this really requires a careful and complex answer but one thing I think helps to explain it is an episode in his own life, when he was 12 or 13, that is given a slightly different twist near the end of the novel. He was given an unexpected and unwelcome first experience of sex when he delivered a message to a prostitute who had been prepared for his arrival and gave him no choice in the matter. He was petrified and repelled but, retrospectively, like most young men, would eventually come to boast that he was not scared at all and had loved the experience. The narrator of the novel seems to suggest that this has addicted him (the narrator) to non-marital sex, which is exciting but also usually superficial, and has caused all his psychological peculiarities and indeed his bachelorhood.
Much more to say but not enough time and space!
Diplopito asks about unfinished business:
García Márquez once mentioned that his autobiography consisted of three volumes: first one, “Vivir para contarla”; second, his experience in Europe and, third, a series of talks and profiles with remarkable people that he met along his life. The Harry Ransom Centre does not answer any inquiry relating to these two last volumes. Do you know if he managed to finish them or they remained only as a plan?
Guardian contributor Hello, Diplopito. I asked him regularly about this, sometimes to his annoyance. He had once said his memoirs would reach six volumes. I am not sure he wrote much of the second volume you mention but I am pretty sure he wrote quite a lot about the people he met, especially politicians. He once told me he was thinking of cutting it down and calling it ‘My Friends the Presidents’. I said I didn’t think that would be good for his reputation and he said--well, I won’t tell you what he said! The question is whether these notes and manuscripts were kept or thrown away and it appears they were thrown away. Which, if true, is a great pity. (He did not believe much in keeping things for posterity.)
JohnCa asks:
Did Márquez ever feel a contradiction between his need for freedom of speech to exercise his profession and his friendship with a dictator who repressed that freedom and was at the top of a political system which imprisoned writers for trying to exercise it?
Guardian contributor Would you believe it, this is the number 2 question I've been asked down the years!
Yes. It caused him constant problems. On the one hand he disagreed (mainly in private) re the Cuban communist approach to freedom of speech. (‘Inside the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing’.) On the other he was aware that no society allows 100% freedom of speech and as a man who had been writing in newspapers that belonged to other people since he was aged 18 he was convinced that Western journalists are, in the last analysis, only as free as newspaper proprietors allow them to be. (His participation in the 1981 MacBride Commission Report to Unesco is a good place to start thinking about this problem.) His enemies say he was a hypocrite. GGM himself said that we don’t choose the world we live in and have to make compromises as and when our conscience allows. It will remain a matter of dispute for as long as he is read.
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When Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel García Márquez
kenningar wants to talk about the boxing:
Why did Vargas Llosa hit Gabo? What is the origin of their dispute?
Guardian contributor Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is the number 1 question people have asked me over the past 25 years. So thanks for asking it. (Or maybe not!!!...)
First of all, if I know the answer I’ll be giving a world exclusive on this Guardian webchat and my publishers will not be happy. And if I don’t know the answer I don’t want to admit it here and now.
What I can say is that I am fairly confident that I’ve heard more variants and versions than any other human being and could write a book just on this matter alone. The most frequent motives suggested are sexual rivalry (we do know that Vargas Llosa mentioned his wife straight after the punch but we are not sure what his alleged statement actually meant), political rivalry and literary rivalry—often enough with all three combined.
More news next year!
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Ritmos1922 asks:
How much NeoBarrocco are Gabo’s literary masterpieces?
Guardian contributor Critics are still arguing about that. If any of them qualify it must surely be Autumn of the Patriarch.
arranview wants to take us back to the 1960s:
I would like to ask Mr Martin what he thinks the Latin American literary “Boom” means now. A long time has passed since those great “bricks” of the 1960s and 70s. I would also like to ask what he thinks of the psychological insight of GGM’s novels.
Guardian contributor I’m still a huge admirer of the Boom which, despite the name, I always took seriously. Its key writers were the fab four Cortazar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez. It was the publication of OHYS exactly 50 years ago which sealed the deal and made the name stick. Latin American literature suddenly came into focus for itself and the world and has been one of the three or four leading literatures in the world ever since—possibly the most important of all.
As for GGM’s psychological insight he does not write typically psychology-based 19thC-type novels but I would say that he is one of the wisest human beings I have been privileged to meet and that that wisdom is evident everywhere in his books. He certainly saw straight through me!
While richieroma wants to explore the line between fiction and reality:
Have always been haunted since reading Innocent Erendira. I know she makes an appearance in One Hundred Years of Solitude too. Was she partly based on a real person or event?
Guardian contributor Yes, it's yet another of his fact-based obsessions. She was inspired by a girl GGM saw when he was about nineteen in the north Colombian outback. She looked about twelve and she was being made to have sex with dozens of men queuing up outside a lean-to by a river. Most people took it for granted as the way of the world but he never forgot.
vammyp has another subject in mind:
Do you think the young people wearing beanie hats in the summertime look stupid?
Guardian contributor
barefeet1099 reflects on reading García Márquez in Spanish:
I speak Spanish as a second language and it was a real milestone for me when I reached a level where I could read García Márquez in the original. I find the richness of the language both rewarding and somewhat daunting, and sometimes the sentence construction is tricky for me to parse. I don’t have the same problem with other writers, e.g. Isabel Allende.
My question is therefore – what do you think are the most important ways that he uses the Spanish language in his work, and what elements of that are most tricky to capture in translation (into English particularly)?
Guardian contributor Yes, he is more difficult to read than he seems at first sight. The combination of ordinariness and literariness in his prose is especially complex and subtle and this tends to get ironed out in English translation. Plus Spanish speakers have a tendency to high-flown concepts and high-flown prose (something many English speakers deplore—though not me!) and GGM makes the most of this (the title of this novel, for example) while ironising it in a multitude of brilliant but usually invisible ways. Congratulations on being able to read it in Spanish: the first big one is of course the hardest. (I can feel a Bob Dylan quotation coming on!)
While KevinHowlett had a similar experience:
The Spanish he uses is full of Colombian idioms. Colombians have a very particular and amusingly folkloric way of speaking, Macondian, almost.
Guardian contributor They do. But they also pride themselves on speaking the clearest and most grammatical Spanish in the world. That’s why Bogota was known as ‘the Athens of South America’ in the 19thC
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bambino1992 asks:
How did Márquez feel about poetry? Why did he chose the novel format over poetry? Did he have a favourite poet?
Guardian contributor Hi Bambino,
He adored poetry, as only Colombians and a few other nationalities can, and I think you can see that in all his novels. Why the novel? I suppose because many novelists write to fill absences or heal emotional pains and he had quite a few of those in his childhood and also his teens. But also, as he grew older he became political, and in becoming political he began to take an interest in history and the novel is the literary form that most intimately unites our experience of the world with the history of everything else going on around us.
fullerov has alternative history in mind:
How do you feel García Márquez’s literature would have developed had he stayed in Bogotá in the late 1940’s rather than returning to the costeño background he was more accustomed (suited/) to in Cartagena and Barranquilla?
Guardian contributor You have to think that he would have been a much more or somewhat more traditional and straitlaced writer than he turned out to be. He’d certainly have been more influenced by European writers than, for example, the U.S. writers like Hemingway and Faulkner that were more admired in Barranquilla and much more closely matched his own experience and his own literary needs. As you obviously know, the conflict between Costenos (people from the Caribbean coast) and Cachacos (people from Bogota) is absolutely crucial in all his books.
PBCC asks about the Mexican connection:
Why did GGM choose to live out his days in Mexico instead of his beloved home country?
Guardian contributor Because he needed some distance from Colombia but didn’t want to be in Europe or the US. In later years he tried to go back and live in Colombia several times but politics and death threats got in the way. He had houses in Bogota and Cartagena, though, and visited as often as he could. Of course Mexico is a fabulous country and perhaps the most ‘Latin American’ one of all, so it served him very well. And after a while his sons had become Mexicans and that made him even more determined to stay.
palfreyman wants to talk favourites:
For reasons of my own, I vastly prefer Chronicle of a Death Foretold to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Do you have a favourite Márquez novel? If so, which is it and why is it your favourite?
Guardian contributor Hi Palfreyman,
Yes, Chronicle is a wonderful book, a classic. Mine is OHYS, rather predictably, for personal reasons too (the time when I read it, the difficulties it gave me) but also for professional (i.e. academic) reasons, in terms of its aesthetic achievement and its ever-expanding historical importance as a literary Big Bang. Emotionally, though, my favourite is The General in His Labyrinth. Those in the know always say you can’t write great works of literature about great men or women and I feared for GGM’s reputation as he wrote this. But it was a triumph and has contributed to the view of Bolivar we all have today. And I’ve always had a soft spot for Bolivar and an admiration for his efforts to unite Latin America. And a sympathy for those who, like Bolivar, tried to carry out great undertakings and turned out, as he said, to have ‘ploughed the sea’.
Jonesdelaplaya brings the discussion up to the present day:
How would GGM feel about the recent moves to bring a permanent peace to his homeland and did he ever imagine what the country could achieve it ever became free of internal conflict and division?
Guardian contributor He would have been very profoundly moved. I think it's fair to say that no one did more than he did to try to bring peace to Colombia (and other Latin American regions, like Central America) over the past forty years. He was always convinced that his country was full of especially talented people and that the endless wars (and structural injustices that caused them) deprived most of them of the productive destinies they might have had.
samjordison wants to broaden things out a little:
I have a slightly tangental question: Do you have any favourite younger Latin-American authors we should be reading?
Guardian contributor This is the quick way to lose friends! Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Alberto Fuguet, Santiago Roncagliolo, Leila Guerriero and at least a dozen more.
allworthy asks about Márquez’s writing in other forms:
Have only read 100 Years – a work of wonder and riches – so don’t know a huge amount about Marquez. Aware he wrote a wide range of different kinds of writing. What would you say was the relationship between these different kinds of forms? He was a journalist first. How did he fit form to subject?
Guardian contributor As I’ve said in other answers, almost everything he ever wrote was based on real events rather than pure imagination—even though few writers have ever been more imaginative than him. So his novels and his journalism have that authenticity and down-to-earthness in common. And so to answer your last question schematically, the subject came first and determined the form, in all the different genres he worked in.
Gabriel García Márquez's life and work
PlumedCrest100 wants to know about the relationship between Márquez’s life and work:
What event or events in Márquez’s life do you think had the most impact on his work?
Guardian contributor Haha, I’d need to write a biography to answer this question! But off the top of my head: Being left by his mother at his grandparents’ house (for what turned out to be six years) when he was a toddler, which made him need to be a writer. Winning a scholarship to a kind of state grammar school in Zipaquira, near Bogota, when he was 15, which helped him to actually become a writer. The 1948 Bogotazo, the key event in 20thC history for all Colombians, when he was 21 years of age, which prompted him to become, broadly speaking, a socialist. There, thank you, you’ve just made me teach myself something!
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Malunkey asks:
I’ve always seen the Spanish Golden Age poet Gongora as a possible forefather for García Márquez. Stylistically of course they’re worlds apart, but they seem to share a dense, febrile imagination. I also note that García Márquez’s translator Edith Grossman went on to translate Gongora.
Do you know if García Márquez admired Gongora?
Guardian contributor Yes, he did, though Gongora was not a special favourite. But as you suggest, no Spanish-speaking writer can easily ignore Gongora. Poetry is more important in Colombia than almost any other Latin American country (except maybe Chile and Nicaragua—forgive the generalisations) and GGM could quote large chunks of poetry from all over the Spanish-speaking world, including the Spanish Golden Age. Forced to choose, I’d say Dario and Neruda (Nicaraguan and Chilean) were his two top favourites.
Humean wants to return to questions raised earlier:
My question would be to reiterate the ones Sam asked at the end of the most recent entry in the reading week, esp. viz. the place of violence done to women in Márquez’s work and whether he ever touched on this in their conversations.
Guardian contributor Yes, we talked about it quite a bit. Gabo had his contradictions but he prided himself on his relationships with women and, generalising again, I’d say it would be difficult to find a Latin American male writer’s work that women love more than his. Speaking now as a teacher I would say that the very interesting discussions on this and other topics in the runup to this webchat did reveal how even among sophisticated readers the question of point of view can repeatedly trip us up. Most men, alas, occasionally feel violent impulses towards women (and men) but to show that in a novel doesn’t mean you approve of it. (Though it is possible, depending on how you go about it, that writing about it does in fact turn you on: it’s both a simple and a complicated matter.) This is one of the most elementary questions about reading (whether novels or newspapers or advertisements) and is almost the first and last thing that ought to be taught in schools in a democratic society. So I have often wondered why it is taught so rarely…
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liam1988 asks:
Márquez’s memoir ‘Living to Tell the Tale’ ends right as he leaves for Europe in 1955. What can you tell us about his time as a correspondent on the continent?
Guardian contributor It’s very interesting. He learned a lot, as you would imagine, but unlike virtually every famous Latin American writer he refused to be impressed or intimidated (even when he was!) and concentrated more on society and the people than on churches, universities and museums. Of course it was also at the very height of the Cold War and he was very interested in whether Europe would stay liberal-capitalist or go communist.
Gallinaingles continues, with a spoiler alert:
SPOILER ALERT WRT LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
Why do you think Florentino Aziz treated that teenage girl so badly towards the end of Love in the Time of Cholera? Until that point in the book, Aziz comes across as an eccentric figure and unlikely lothario, but not as somebody capable of such cruelty. What is the significance of their relationship and Aziz’s unkind actions? García Márquez is my favourite author, but I have never managed to reconcile this episode in Love in the Time of Cholera with the tone in the rest of the book, or indeed, his other books.
Guardian contributor Yes, it's troubling, isn't it. It happens all the time, of course, all over the world. But it's undoubtedly an obsession in GGM's books. And possibly in GGM himself. I have always wondered if it goes back to some guilty secret, or just a guilty desire. But when I asked him about it he just looked at me.
notwiseoldowl asks:
What is Márquez’s reaction to the character in Hanif Kureishi’s Black album who criticises Márquez for giving all his characters the same name in “100 Years”?
Guardian contributor I'm afraid there is no answer to that! The biographical answer is that once I went to an Indian community in the Guajira related to GGM's family and they told me that all the male babies were called Gabriel Jose. I thought they were joking but it turned out to be true!
BillyMills joins in:
Not a question. I just wanted to say that Relato de un náufrago is my favourite of all his great novels. It seems to me to be absolutely pivotal.
Guardian contributor It has always astonished critics how well this little book keeps selling. He could have been one of the most famous journalists in the world. Great admirer of Defoe.
celticgirl44 starts us off:
Is One Hundred Years of Solitude an optimistic or pessimistic novel?
Guardian contributor Both! It depends on your point of view. But my own point of view is that it's open to multiple interpretations and he means both extremes to coincide.
Post your questions for Gerald Martin
On Friday 26 May at 1pm BST, Gerald Martin, the author of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life will be joining us for a live webchat.
Martin spent 17 years writing his biography and knew García Márquez well. Indeed, the latter once told a Barcelona newspaper that he couldn’t answer a question about his past due to his failing memory, but that they should “ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing”. The 545-page published work was whittled down from more than 2,000 pages (with extra footnotes) and exhaustive research. Unsurprisingly then, the Observer described this first full biography of the author to be published in English as “a landmark”.
The book examines García Márquez’s astonishing rise from obscurity, his many encounters with death and murder, his first-hand experience of many of the tragedies and upheavals in Colombian politics – and his eventual friendship with extraordinary figures such as Fidel Castro. To understand this life is to understand a lot more about the writing and those hazy boundaries between magic and realism that have intrigued us in this month’s Reading group.
As for Martin, here’s what the New York Times had to say:
“Could any biographer have been better suited to this gargantuan undertaking? Absolutely not: Martin is the ideal man for the job. He has already written studies of 20th-century Latin American fiction; translated the work of another Latin American Nobel laureate, Miguel Ángel Asturias; and written about Latin American history. These are essential prerequisites for unraveling the labyrinthine cultural and political aspects of García Márquez’s peripatetic life. So are Martin’s demonstrable patience, wide range of knowledge and keen understanding of his subject’s worldwide literary forebears, from Cervantes to Dostoevsky to Mark Twain.”
We’re very lucky that he is joining us, in other words, and there should be a great deal he can share with us. Fans of Hispanic literature will also be pleased to learn that since the New York Times review was written, Gerald has also almost wrapped up another biography on Mario Vargas Llosa, which Bloomsbury will be publishing in the near future.
Martin will be joining us at 1pm BST on Friday 26 May, but do please feel free to get your question in early. Just to get the ball rolling, thanks to Bloomsbury we have five copies of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life to give away to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive question, in the comments section below.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Sian Cain with your address (sian.cain@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
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Well everyone, time for me to sign off.
Many thanks for the questions--it was fun to read them and I hope at least some of the answers told you something you wanted to know.
Thanks to you, too, Sam--quite an achievement to pilot me through this!
All best, Gerald
PS This experience suddenly reminds me that Gabo was possibly the first top writer in the world to write a novel on a computer. He loved the whole thing and would have been in ecstasy rolling around cyberspace. And OHYS itself is among many other things about a 'global' village, the process of globalisation and the development of communications (which are nearly always in the wrong people's hands...