Hearing the sad news of the passing of Columbian writer Gabriel García Márquez, I’ve been reflecting on what his work meant to me and how it has affected my own writing. My original copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude was a dog-eared paperback I bought at a secondhand bookstall in Calcutta while I was travelling around India in 1989. I had not heard of Marquez nor the book before then, but I’d met several fellow travellers who were reading it at the time. It was the year of the Salman Rushdie fatwah, and magical realism had become trendy, so all the coolest dudes on the Indian hippy trail had stuffed “100 Years” into their backpacks alongside Midnight’s Children and the obligatory On The Road.
Being young and impressionable at the time, the book had a profound effect on me and to some extent I think it has influenced the way I’ve written most of my poems. I was seduced by the idea that you can sweeten stodgy political commentary with a good dollop of fantasy and folklore, and some enlightened readers might still take you seriously. When I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude a couple of years ago, I was surprised to find it rather drawn-out and irritating in many ways. I have become a lot more critical in my decrepitude! Love in the Time of Cholera is much better novel in my opinion, well plotted if somewhat suspect on the paedophilia question.
I also recall battling through one of Marquez’s short stories about a flood in the original Spanish about ten years ago, when I was struggling to learn the language. The effort took me almost a month. I should have attempted an easier Spanish language text - Don Quixote or something...
Having said all that, I still think that I would never have written my On The Verge verse-novel nor the as yet unpublished God The Banana had I never discovered Marquez. I owe him a debt for that.
Being young and impressionable at the time, the book had a profound effect on me and to some extent I think it has influenced the way I’ve written most of my poems. I was seduced by the idea that you can sweeten stodgy political commentary with a good dollop of fantasy and folklore, and some enlightened readers might still take you seriously. When I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude a couple of years ago, I was surprised to find it rather drawn-out and irritating in many ways. I have become a lot more critical in my decrepitude! Love in the Time of Cholera is much better novel in my opinion, well plotted if somewhat suspect on the paedophilia question.
I also recall battling through one of Marquez’s short stories about a flood in the original Spanish about ten years ago, when I was struggling to learn the language. The effort took me almost a month. I should have attempted an easier Spanish language text - Don Quixote or something...
Having said all that, I still think that I would never have written my On The Verge verse-novel nor the as yet unpublished God The Banana had I never discovered Marquez. I owe him a debt for that.