Gabriel Garcia Marquez:The Early Years | Date: 14 April 2011, 01:42
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In "Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Early Years," author Ilan Stavans provides an illuminating portrait of the cultural and historical conditions that gave birth to one of the most popular authors on the world literary stage. The book is not so much a painstakingly detailed biography of Garcia Marquez but more like a highly entertaining survey of the places, people, and moments that combined to nourish and evolve the author's considerable talent. Or, as Stavans himself put it, "My interest is at once in Garcia Marquez's personal travels and in the historical backdrop against which that traveling unfolded."
On the morning of March 6, 1927, Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The date is important because it marks a time of tremendous change for the town and its citizens as advances in travel and agriculture made Aracataca more subject to exchanges with the rest of the modernized world. There's not much along these line Stavans can tell us which has not already been well documented. Garcia Marquez himself did, after all, share a great deal in his own autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, the first of a projected three volumes.
What Stavans does provide is a brilliant perspective that places the author in a succession of contexts framed by definitive moments. In regard to Aracataca specifically, he widens the angle (so to speak) in such a way that we see both how the town gave birth to the writer and how the writer in turn helped bring new economic life to the town. He also takes us inside the "wide constellation of females" that watched over Garcia Marquez in his childhood and later inspired the creation of some of his most memorable characters.
Stavans allows us to witness Garcia Marquez's intense love affair with reading, the romantic-comedy courtship that led to a celebrated marriage, the author's adulthood apprenticeship as a journalist and script writer, and the progression of events that led to the composition of his most championed masterwork: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Book Club).
As far as anyone can tell, One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold upwards of 30 million copies, possibly even more than 40 million. It is celebrated in part for Garcia Marquez's bold, skillful, and groundbreaking employment of magical realism. One of the great services Stavans renders his readers is the discussion on the origins of magical realism in which he points out that, "The publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967 almost single-handedly turned magic realism into a fashion."
However, that phenomenal event did not mark the world's introduction to the idea that would eventually spawn an entire genre: "The first," notes Stavan, "to use the term `magic realism' was the German art critic Franz Roh in his book Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Problem der neuesten Europaschen Malerei." Franz Roh used the term to describe aesthetic innovations in art during the 1920s. The term made its way into at least one Hispanic literary magazine of the period and the concept was likely further influenced by the development of French surrealism as well.
The single greatest acknowledged influence on Garcia Marquez's use of the style was the fiction of Mexican-born author Juan Rulfo. With only a single collection of short stories entitled The Burning Plain (19853) and a novel titled Pedro Paramo (1955), Rulfo gained a loyal "cult" following. As for Garcia Marquez, "Reading Rulfo made him aware of his own potential."
For all the greatness so evident in his talent, the author's life may very well have been a much-less celebrated one had it not been for the literary movement known as "El Boom," and for Carmen Balcells, the woman whose labors did so much to make it happen. El Boom represents a major defining moment in modern literary history. Operating as a literary agent specializing in the sale of foreign rights, Carmen Balcells achieved remarkable success promoting and selling the works of such now preeminent authors as: Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso, Camilo Jose Cela, Carlos Fuentes, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Garcia Marquez. It is highly notable that earlier this year, 2010, Vargas Llosa became the second member of the group to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Moreover, although the time of El Boom may have ended, arguably at the close of the 1970s,the cultural pathway it cleared for Latin-American writers has remained an open one. In that sense, the movement can be compared to the great Harlem Renaissance that propelled African Americans into the mainstream of American publishing for the first time from the 1920s to the 1940s.
In addition to being the general editor of the The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature and editor of Critical Insights, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stavan is the creator of acclaimed works in his own right, making him one of the better equipped authors to offer a biography on Garcia Marquez. The analytical portrait he creates in The Early Years is indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the significance of the Nobel Laureate's work or who simply enjoy sharing a passionate chronicler's enthusiasm for great books and writers.
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