Storytellers Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez Remain Alive and Agile in Minds of Readers Across The World

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a peerless artist of magic realism in fictional works, particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Magic realism stands for a narrative instrument in literature in which miraculous or paranormal events are portrayed like ordinary day-to-day phenomena and the other way round it depicts mundane or ordinary occurrences like supernatural fantasies. The term “magic realism” was introduced for the first time by German art scholar Franz Roh in 1925. There are several instances of magic realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude and in some other books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one the most eminent and the most applauded authors of all times hailing from Colombia who barely needs to be introduced to the readers.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminated him with fame right in the wake of its publication in 1967. One Hundred Years of Solitude is viewed as one of the greatest literary works of all centuries and any discourse on global literature remains acutely stunted without references to this novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude not just placed Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an outstanding novelist on the global stage; it ornamented him with Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. One Hundred Years of Solitude is an indispensable book for a deeper look into the rise of civilization in South America and humans’ settlement across the Caribbean Islands. Not only that, this marvelous novel movingly deals with the horrors of civil wars in some parts of Latin America, the exploitation of native Colombian people at the hands of foreign companies and an intense, passionate love story and all these things are found going on through seven generations of the Buendia family in a fictional town called Macondo.

Solitude is a very noteworthy motif in most of the stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude is located in the remote jungles of Colombian rainforest, far away from the rest of the world. People living inside that far-off village are hardly recognized or noted by the rest of the globe, as the novel shows. Similarly, in No One Writes to the Colonel, another best-known book by Garcia Marquez, we find a retired colonel of Colombian army leading a very lonesome life with his ever-ailing wife. The colonel was a valiant military officer during his years in combat uniform and he stamped a good number of heroic examples on the battlefield for his country, but after retirement he and his wife are left in deep monetary shortage. The colonel waits years after years for his pension, a healthy amount of money the government had promised him, which doesn’t arrive. He domesticates a rooster which he intends to put in a cockfight contest of his village with the hope that if the rooster wins it can get some money for its master.

The colonel waits for the postman everyday but he never turns out to be lucky enough to receive any good message about his pension from the government. No One Writes to the Colonel tells the story of the dreams we believe in, the hopes we count on and how deeply it hurts when those dreams and hopes end up like a wild goose chase and turn into futile pursuits.

We come across the woes of a nonagenarian who had never been able to have the taste of true love throughout his long and tedious life, as described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his last novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores. The anonymous protagonist, referred to as a “nonagenarian” in the first line of this paragraph, lives in a small town of Colombia and works for a newspaper. He is depicted as an affluent man but he does the job to keep himself occupied with something as he has been followed by solitude all his life.

Due to his persistent loneliness, he developed the habit of going to red-light areas frequently for libidinous pleasures, but the sensational hours he spends with whores cannot make him oblivious of his thirst for authentic love. So, a depressive sense of desolation sticks to his mind all the time. However, on the night of his ninetieth birthday he manages to find a young girl who unwittingly casts a spell of magical fascination over him and makes him feel that the kind of love he had been questing for throughout his life, is now perhaps about to flood him with an unprecedented bliss at such a time while the thought of inescapable mortality is lurking at the back of his mind.

In Innocent Erendira, a highly acclaimed short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, readers get introduced to a beautiful girl who goes through unspeakable hardships under her ruthless and immoral grandmother’s disposal. Her grandmother forces her to give sexual pleasure to people to earn money. The sufferings and tribulations of Erendira touch the hearts of all readers. The story closes with Erendira picking up enough guts to stab her grandmother one night and running away with a man who had come to have sex with Erendira but instead falls in love with her and persuades her to move away with him from her vicious grandmother’s house. Erendira, who is found in the entire story as a meek girl is transformed into an emboldened one with the power of love that came from that man who takes her away with him after she hits her grandmother with a knife. Love taught Erendira to fight back and love has the charisma to become a lethal weapon anytime to instigate people to strike back at repression, this story suggests.

Love in the Time of Cholera, Leaf Storm and The Autumn of the Patriarch are some other glaring novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez while Living to Tell the Tale is his autobiography.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez implemented another narrative strategy in some of his novels—metafiction. Metafiction refers to instances when an author moves beyond his fictional apparatus and includes some non-fictional aspects like history, anthropology and geography in his descriptions to add a lifelike touch to his stories. One Hundred Years of Solitude contains a number of narrative instances that very closely resemble metafiction. That’s why the story of this convoluted novel sounds so close to real life once it’s understood by the readers. Most of the books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez were translated into English by iconic translators like Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman who were able to retain the original appeal of Garcia Marquez’s stories while converting the books from Spanish into English language.

Luminaries like Gabriel Garcia Marquez are not frequently born. Neither do they die once for all because they remain alive and agile in the minds of readers across the world. Death took Gabriel Garcia Marquez away from us a few years ago, but his demise did not terminate his creations. His matchless stories and the legendary men and women he characterized in his books will keep on amazing us forever.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury is a
contributor to different English
newspapers and magazines.