Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014

I read books from a very early age.   Gabriel Garcia Marquez made me want to write them.  I couldn't tell you when I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It was sometime late in high school or early in college, I think- even though I remember seeing Tom Hanks' character read it in Turner and Hooch as a kid and I remember picking up the copy that The Cigar Parentals had tucked away on the bottom shelf of one of our bookcases downstairs and wondering what it was actually about.

But when I heard the story about Marquez being taken by his grandfather up the mountain near his native Aracataca, Colombia to search for ice- I don't know why, but that made me stop wondering what the book was about and actually pick it up and read it.   And that, really and truly, changed my life.

I plunged through One Hundred Years of Solitude, gobbled up Love In The Time of Cholera and didn't stop there.  Esquival, Allende, Amado, Vargas Llosa- all fell into my lap and I loved every minute of them. But the joy of discovering an entirely new genre (magic realism) was doubled as it provided a ton of cultural and historical education about Latin America- which I realized and realize to this day that I know very little about.  (Which is strange, when you think about it- I'm sure students in say, England learn about the history of countries like France- but I know I never really got the 4-1-1 on Canada or Mexico and points south.)

Then I picked up The Autumn of The Patriarch.

If One Hundred Years of Solitude opened up the doorways to a whole genre of writing and a whole region of the world that I had known comparatively little about, The Autumn of The Patriarch showed me the possibilities of what you can do with writing itself.  The story of a dying fascist dictator in the Caribbean, it unfolds in one, long, dreamlike sentence, a stream of consciousness that eventually culminate with these closing lines:

"...flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilations and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end."

Seriously.  Read that.   Then read it again.  And again and just let the poetry, the ebb and flow of the language wash over you.  Maybe it's because Marquez's first language wasn't English and he just had really great translations for all his books or maybe he was just a genius amazing writer- but the fact that someone could do this is inspiring.

It's taken me the better part of a week to write this- for some reason, it just didn't want to gel and how do you put into words exactly what impact Marquez had on my reading and my writing? All I know is that last week, the world lost a genius and we're poorer for it.