MENDOZA: If it’s true every writer spends his life writing a single book, which would yours be? The book of Macondo?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: You know that’s not right. Only two of my novels, Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and some short stories published in Big Mama’s Funeral, take place in Macondo. The others—Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold—are set in another town on the Colombian coast.
MENDOZA: A town with no train and no smell of bananas.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: … but with a river. A town you can only get to by launch.
MENDOZA: If it isn’t the book of Macondo, what would your one book be?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The book of solitude. If you recall, the main character in Leaf Storm lives and dies in the most absolute solitude. Solitude haunts the central figure in Nobody Writes to the Colonel—the Colonel waits, Friday after Friday, with his wife and his cockerel, for a war pension which never comes. The Mayor who fails to win the town’s confidence in In Evil Hour is a solitary figure too. In his own way, he knows the solitude of power.
MENDOZA: Like Aureliano Buendía and the Patriarch.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Exactly. Solitude is the theme in The Autumn of the Patriarch and of course in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
MENDOZA: If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood, perhaps?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I think it’s a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously. I’m just another of them. Aren’t you?
MENDOZA: Yes, I am too. Your first book, Leaf Storm, contains the seed of One Hundred Years of Solitude. What do you feel now about the young man who wrote that book?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I feel a lot of sympathy for him because he wrote it in a hurry. He thought he wasn’t ever going to write again, that he only had this one chance, so he tried to put all his accumulated know-how into the book, particularly the literary techniques and tricks he’d borrowed from the English and American novelists he was reading at the time.
MENDOZA: Virginia Woolf; Joyce; Faulkner, obviously. The technique of Leaf Storm is very like that of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It’s not exactly the same. I use three perfectly identifiable viewpoints, although I don’t give them names. There’s an old man, a boy, and a woman. You can see that Leaf Storm and The Autumn of the Patriarch have the same technique and the same theme (attitudes to a dead man). The difference is that in Leaf Storm I didn’t dare let myself go and the monologues conform to too strict a pattern, while in The Autumn of the Patriarch, I use multiple monologues, sometimes within the same sentence. By the time I reached this book, I could fly solo. I let myself off the leash and did whatever took my fancy.
MENDOZA: Let’s go back to the young man who wrote Leaf Storm. You were twenty.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Twenty-two.
MENDOZA: You were twenty-two, you were living in Barranquilla, and you wrote the novel, if I remember rightly, working very late at night in the editorial offices of a newspaper after everyone else had gone home.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In El Heraldo.
MENDOZA: Yes, I know those offices—neon lights, ceiling fans, always extremely hot. Right outside was a street full of underworld bars. The Calle del Crimen—Crime Street. Do they still call it that?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That’s right, La Calle del Crimen. I used to live there, in one of those hotels for casual customers which are really brothels. The room cost one peso fifty a night. El Heraldo paid me three pesos per column and sometimes another three for an editorial. When I hadn’t got the one-fifty to pay for the room, I used to leave the manuscript of Leaf Storm as a deposit with the hotel porter. He knew that I valued those papers highly. A long time afterward, when I had already written One Hundred Years of Solitude, I came across this porter among the people who’d come to see me or ask for my autograph. He remembered everything.
MENDOZA: Did you have any trouble getting Leaf Storm published?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It took me five years to find a publisher. I sent it to Editorial Losada, a publishing house in Argentina, and they sent it back to me with a letter from the Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre advising me to concentrate on other things. He did, however, recognize something in me that now gives me a lot of satisfaction—a definite feeling for poetry.
MENDOZA: I think I’ve heard you say that something similar happened in France. With Roger Caillois, if I’m not mistaken?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Nobody Writes to the Colonel was offered to Gallimard a long time before One Hundred Years of Solitude. There were two readers—Juan Goytisolo and Roger Caillois. Goytisolo, who wasn’t the good friend of mine then that he is now, wrote an excellent reader’s note. Caillois, on the other hand, rejected the book outright. I had to write One Hundred Years of Solitude before Gallimard became interested in any of my books. But by then my agent had other commitments in France.
MENDOZA: Between Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude (i.e., Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, Big Mama’s Funeral), your novels suddenly became realistic, restrained, more limited both in construction and use of language, and they contain neither magic nor anything outrageous. How do you explain this change?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When I wrote Leaf Storm I was convinced that every good novel should be a poetic transposition of reality. But, if you remember, that book appeared during a period of very bloody political repression in Colombia and my militant friends gave me a terrible guilt complex. “Your novel doesn’t condemn or expose anything,” they said. I find this notion very simplistic and mistaken now, but at the time, I felt I should involve myself with the country’s immediate political and social reality more, and I moved a long way away from my initial literary ideas. Luckily I was able to get back to them. In the meantime, I ran the serious risk of getting my head kicked in.
Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama’s Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia, and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don’t regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality. However good or bad they may be, they are books which finish on the last page. I find them too limiting now. I believe I’m capable of writing something better.
MENDOZA: What made you change course?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Thinking about my own work. I thought about it a long time and finally came to the conclusion that it was not to the social and political reality of my country that I was committed but to the total reality of this world and the next without wishing to show favor or belittle any particular aspect.
MENDOZA: This means that, through your own experience, you have rebuffed the famous “committed literature,” which has caused so many rifts in Latin America.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: As you know very well, when it comes to my own personal political choices, I do have a commitment, a political commitment.
MENDOZA: To socialism …
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I want the world to be socialist, and I believe that sooner or later it will be. However, I have a great many reservations about what came in Latin America to be called “committed literature,” or more precisely the novel of social protest (the high point of this literature). This is mainly because I think its limited view of the world and life does not help achieve anything in political terms. Far from accelerating any process of raising consciousness, it actually slows it down. Latin Americans expect more from a novel than an exposé of the oppression and injustice they know all too well. Many of my militant friends who so often feel the need to dictate to writers what they should or should not write are, unconsciously perhaps, taking a reactionary stance inasmuch as they are imposing restrictions on creative freedom. I believe a novel about love is as valid as any other. When it comes dow
n to it, the writer’s duty—his revolutionary duty, if you like—is to write well.
MENDOZA: Having freed yourself from this commitment to an immediate political reality, how did you come to find this other—let’s call it mythical—approach to reality which produced One Hundred Years of Solitude?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: As I’ve already said, my grandmother’s stories probably gave me the first clues. The myths, legends, and beliefs of the people in her town were, in a very natural way, all part of her everyday life. With her in mind, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t inventing anything at all but simply capturing and recounting a world of omens, premonitions, cures, and superstitions that is authentically ours, truly Latin American. Remember those men in Colombia who get worms out of cows’ ears by saying prayers, for example. Our day-to-day life in Latin America is full of this kind of thing.
I was able to write One Hundred Years of Solitude simply by looking at reality, our reality, without the limitations which rationalists and Stalinists through the ages have tried to impose on it to make it easier for them to understand.
MENDOZA: And the larger-than-life element, the exaggerated proportions in One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch and your latest stories—is that real as well or is it literary license?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: No, disproportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself out of all proportion. This often presents serious problems for writers who can’t find words to describe it. If you talk about a river, the biggest one a European reader can imagine is the Danube, which is 1,770 miles long. How can the reader imagine the Amazon, which at certain points is so wide you can’t even see across it? The word “storm” conjures up one thing for the European reader and quite another for us. The same applies to the word “rain,” which cannot possibly convey the meaning of the torrential downpours of the tropics. Rivers with boiling water, storms which make the earth tremble, cyclones which sweep away whole towns are not inventions but the vast dimensions of the natural world in our hemisphere.
MENDOZA: So you borrowed the myths, the magic, the exaggerated proportions from our own reality. What about the language? The language in One Hundred Years of Solitude has a sparkle, a richness, a profusion which you don’t find in your previous books, except for the title story in Big Mama’s Funeral.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: This may sound conceited, but in fact I’ve always been able to write like that. It’s just that I hadn’t needed to use it before.
MENDOZA: Do you mean to say a writer can change language from one book to another as you change your shirt from one day to the next? Don’t you think language is an integral part of a writer’s identity?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: No, I think the theme of the book determines the choice of technique and language. The language I use in Nobody Writes to the Colonel, in In Evil Hour, and in Big Mama’s Funeral is concise, restrained, and governed by a journalistic concern for efficiency. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, I needed a richer language to introduce this other reality, which we’ve agreed to call mythical or magical.
MENDOZA: And in The Autumn of the Patriarch?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I needed to find yet another language and extricate myself from the one I used in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
MENDOZA: The Autumn of the Patriarch is a prose poem. Were you influenced by your training in poetry?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: No, by music mainly. I’ve never listened to so much music in my life as when I was writing that book.
MENDOZA: Which music did you choose?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In this particular case, Béla Bártok and all Caribbean popular music. The mixture of the two had to be explosive.
MENDOZA: You’ve also said that the book contains a lot of allusions and turns of phrase found in popular everyday speech.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That’s right. The Autumn of the Patriarch is my most colloquial novel; it’s the closest to the themes, expressions, songs, and refrains of the Caribbean. It contains expressions only a Barranquilla taxi driver could understand.
MENDOZA: What do you feel about your work in retrospect? Your early books, for instance.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I feel the rather paternal tenderness I mentioned before, the same thing you feel for children who’ve grown up and left home. I see those early books as faraway and defenseless and remember all the headaches they gave the young man who wrote them.
MENDOZA: They were problems you’d solve quite easily now.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, problems which wouldn’t be problems at all now.
MENDOZA: Is there a thread which runs through both those early books and the ones which were later to make you world-famous?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, there is, and I feel I need to know the thread is there inside and still needs protecting.
MENDOZA: Which is your most important book?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The Autumn of the Patriarch is the most important from a literary point of view, the one which might save me from oblivion.
MENDOZA: You’ve also said it’s the one you most enjoyed writing. Why?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Because it’s the book I always wanted to write, and it’s where I’ve gone furthest in my personal confessions.
MENDOZA: Duly camouflaged, of course.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Of course.
MENDOZA: It was also the book which took you longest to write.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Seventeen years in all. And I abandoned two versions before hitting on the right one.
MENDOZA: So it’s your best book?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Before I wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I used to say my best novel was Nobody Writes to the Colonel. I rewrote it nine times and it seemed the least vulnerable of my works to me.
MENDOZA: But you think Chronicle of a Death Foretold is even better.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes.
MENDOZA: In which sense?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In the sense that I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. This had never happened before. In my other books the story took over, the characters took on a life of their own and did whatever they fancied.
MENDOZA: That’s one of the most extraordinary things about literary creation …
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: But I felt I needed to write a book over which I could exercise strict control, and I think I did it in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The theme demanded the precise structure of a detective story.
MENDOZA: It’s very odd that you never mention One Hundred Years of Solitude among your best books when many critics consider it is unsurpassable. Do you really feel so bitter about it?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, I do. It nearly ruined my life. Nothing was ever the same again after it was published.
MENDOZA: Why?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Because fame unsettles your sense of reality, almost as much as power perhaps, and it continually threatens your private life. Unfortunately, nobody believes this until they have to put up with it.
MENDOZA: Is it that you feel the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude is unfair to the rest of your work?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, it’s unfair. The Autumn of the Patriarch is a much more important literary achievement. But whereas it is about the solitude of power, One Hundred Years of Solitude is about the solitude of everyday life. It’s everybody’s life story. Also, it’s written in a simple, flowing, linear, and, I’d even say (I’ve said it before), superficial way.
MENDOZA: You seem to despise it.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: No, but since I knew it was written with all the tricks and artifices under the sun, I knew I could do better even before I wrote it.
MENDOZA: That you could beat it.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, that I could beat it.
A STAMP USED ONLY FOR LOVE LETTERS
TWO INTERVIEWS BY DAVID STREITFELD
MEXICO CITY AND WASHINGTON, D.C.
1993 AND 1997
My first interview with Gabriel García Márquez took place in late 1993 at his house in Mexico City. He was just finishing Del
amor y otros demonios, a minor but charming work published in Spanish the next year and in English as Of Love and Other Demons in 1995, and was beginning to conceive a multivolume autobiography, the first and only volume of which was published in 2002. He was recovering from his first bout with cancer, a situation that fed his hypochondria and melancholy. The conversation, spread over two days, took place in a bungalow adjacent to the main house. Pleasant but not ostentatious, it was at once library, office and man-cave. It was very well heated.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: (Points to the tape-recorder.) Do we really have to use that? I’m an enemy of the tape-recorder. It has an ear but no heart. You could take notes.
STREITFELD: I write very slowly. So I’m afraid we must use it. Otherwise, this interview would last until next week.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Okay, then. I’m sorry I don’t speak English. The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was not learning how to speak English perfectly. (Gestures in surrender.) Ask me what you will.
Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview Page 5