Gabriel García Márquez Read Free Page A

Story of a Shipwreck,” scandalized Bogotá in the mid-fifties.
    I explore his connection with
El grupo de Barranquilla
, a cadre of dilettantes (writers, photographers, dancers) who orbited around Ramón Vinyes, known as
El sabio catalán
, or the wise Catalan, with whom he forged a lasting friendship. Some of them, such as Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Álvaro Mutis, and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, are essential to understanding García Márquez’s Colombian footing and his transition to the European, Cuban, and Mexican periods. I study his connection to the Cartagena intelligentsia. I survey his sexual escapades and focus on his courtship of Mercedes Barcha Prado, his lifelong wife, whom he met at a high-school dance when he was nineteen and she thirteen. I examine his debt to William Faulkner and the influence Borges had on his oeuvre. I scrutinize the writer’s block he experienced in the early sixties and his discovery of Juan Rulfo’s fiction, which triggered the creative output that resulted in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
    I consider the camaraderie he forged with other Spanish-language writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and, to a lesser extent, Julio Cortázar, a connection that benefited them as a group in marketing terms but was put to the test by polarizing ideological issues in the late seventies. Unlike his literary colleagues, García Márquez was a
costeño
with an acute sense of place, someone who had traveled far beyond his humble origins without ever truly leaving them behind.
    A crucial aspect in García Márquez’s early years is his collaboration with Mexican filmmakers. Starting with his friendship with Mutis—who in turn was an acquaintance of Luis Buñuel—he slowly created partnerships with directors, producers, and actors that allowed him to be involved in a number of important movie projects, the most significant of whichwere
El gallo de oro
and
Tiempo de morir.
The impact of these experiences on García Márquez seemed enormous. Not only are screenplays and other cinematic collaborations an essential component of his oeuvre but, to a large extent, his style was shaped by his exposure to the screen, both as spectator and screenwriter.
    In short,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is my aleph. I quote from it to shed light on García Márquez’s life and vice versa. I’m enthralled by the way it isn’t only a novel; it is a
bitácora
, an account of the most decisive events in Colombia until the sixties. It is also a retelling of the Bible, a summation of the painful colonial past of Latin America, and an autobiographical chronicle of García Márquez’s friendship with important figures of the time. I pay as much attention to its inception as I do to the
rezeptiongeschichte.
I cover how the book is received in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, but especially in the United States, where García Márquez’s posthumous reputation was forever cemented with the publication of Rabassa’s translation.
    To intellectuals in Latin America, García Márquez is a polemical figure. A close friend of Fidel Castro, for years he defended the Cuban Revolution against charges of censorship, corruption, and xenophobia. For scores of young writers, his influence has been both a blessing and a curse. Such is the power of his fiction that successive generations of writers have lived under his shadow, constantly asked to produce narratives with a magical realism bent, even when this style is alien to them. This love-hate relationship is palpable as a reaction to what has come to be known as Macondismo, a concept—or better, a full-fledge ideology—understood to be an index of continental, national, and regional validation. To be a Macondista is to celebrate Latin America as “undecipherable, beyond the code, and as a place whose very disjunctions are, in and of themselves, identifying