gabriel garcia marquez

“If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.” ~Love in the Time of Cholera

I’ve cried twice in my life at the news of an author’s death. The first time was when I was in high school and a friend walked up to me and said, â€œThat author you like just died.â€ When I realized she meant Isaac Asimov, I started crying right there, in the middle of lunch, in front of hundreds of uncaring classmates (a fact that did little to make my misunderstood soul any more understood by my peers.)

The second time is just over two weeks ago when I woke from a restless night to read that Gabriel Garcia Marquez had died. The cover of Love in the Time of Cholera still conjures a clear memory of me perched in my studio apartment devouring the novel over the course of two sun-drenched summer days, the rising heat lending a dreamy quality to the passing hours. I remember reading that famous last line, â€œForever, he saidâ€ and feeling that I was quite simply drunk on love, on language, on the bittersweet beauty of human experience. I immediately immersed myself in everything that Marquez had written, glorying in the sheer sensuality and song that underlies all his work.

It’s been twenty some years since that first fateful encounter and, even as an avid reader, I have yet to encounter another author who can elicit that same heady blend of euphoria, grief, and breathtaking beauty. To read Marquez is to enter into a dream, both haunting and lovely, a world bordering on the impossible and brimming with promise. His titles aloneâ€”One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Of Love and Other Demonsâ€”are stories unto themselves evoking both the fantastical and the real while hinting at the profound themes explored within.

I am, of course, not alone in my adoration of Marquez’ works and news of his death was accompanied by tears the world over. Indeed, his influence on not only readers but also other writers can be seen far and wideâ€”a fact that led me to think about those YA authors whose work captures the spirit of Marquez’s magical realism.

Continue reading Love and Loss: Remembering Gabriel GarcÃÂa MÃ¡rquez, Part 2

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe house, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Like so many others, I remember the day I cracked open a used copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and read the startling opening lines. It was the summer between high school and college, and I was tucked into my dim bedroom, attempting to escape the heat, feeling slightly intimidated but also quite sophisticated as I flipped through to the first page of this literary juggernaut. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I remember reading the book in one huge gulp, though of course that’s not true. What is true is that what I remember of the days that followed is reading the book, and very little else.

Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that Jose Arcadio Buendia was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.

I remember jotting down a short quote–“There is always something left to love”–and feeling like it meant something important. And I remember hazily nearing the end and wondering what in the world I would do when I had to close the book, and then reaching the last page and the “fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble” swept through Macondo, wiping out the city and exiling it from the memory of men, but of course not really. Not from our memories. Instead, those final lines sent me searching for more more more more and I stumbled from Marquez to Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Jose Saramago, and my favorites, Julio Cortazar and Carlos Fuentes. I immersed myself in el realismo magico, despite my inability to read or speak Spanish, pushing the Interlibrary Loan system of the early 90s to its outer limits. I started a small literary magazine–which I edited for almost a decade before it imploded in truly spectacular fashion with the idea of cultivating and promoting North American magic realism.

And when Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on April 17 all of this came tumbling out of the past and into the present and without thinking I cracked open One Hundred Years of Solitude, again but as always, for the first time. The tributes started rolling in immediately, of course, numerous obituaries and remembrances, all with the same basic facts but different spins, depending on how much attention was paid to his politics rather than his writing. A fair amount of ink (or pixels, I guess) was spent defining the term magic realism, despite the fact that Marquez himself eschewed definitions, famously insisting that his work was not fantastic and that everything in his books had happened to himself or an acquaintance.

Continue reading We’ll Always Have Macondo: Remembering Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Part 1