Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Gabriel Garcia Marquez exits the stage

There are some books that one reads and carefully tucks into some bookshelf that eventually becomes their cemetery.

There are others that one reads and are forever rooted in the memory with the seraphic majesty of an apparition.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books have entranced millions of readers for generations.

His death at 87 on April 17 in Mexico City may have claimed a fluid and imaginative mind but it has merely served to immortalise this gentle genius of letters whose powers of expression are like few I have ever come across.

He is best known for three of his books, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and the Autumn of the Patriarch.

But Garcia wrote many other books, most of which never achieved the global acclaim of these three but which were, nevertheless, visceral in their own right.

They include No One Writes to the Colonel, published in 1958, The General and his Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992) and Chronicle of a Death Fore-told (1981).

In the autumn of his life, Marquez also published two books, Living to Tell the Tale (2003) and a most hilarious but short novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004).

WROTE IN SPANISH

Garcia wrote in Spanish. But the avidity with which his books have been gobbled has proved that a good piece of writing will transcend all barriers however seemingly insurmountable they might look.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, has been translated into 35 languages and sold more than 50 million copies world-wide.

Love in the Time of Cholera is today a powerful movie and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, in its smallness, has tickled the funny bones of millions.

But it is One Hundred Years of Solitude which is Garcia’s magnum opus.

A novel of Homeric capacity in its description and melding of magic and reality, it tells of a family, the Buendia family in the imaginative town of Macondo going through the travails of race, social, political and economic upheavals.

The novel blends your everyday life with magical scenes such as where a young woman ascends to heaven while folding the family sheets and where people give birth to reptile-like creatures and are awe-inspiringly endowed in their genitalia like the men described in the book of Ezekiel in the Bible.

NOBEL PRIZE

In awarding Garcia the prize for literature in 1982, the Nobel committee observed, rather aptly, that he had created “a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the sounds of chaos”.

In his acceptance speech titled “The Solitude of Latin America”, Garcia took on the title of his book as the leitmotif of his speech, speaking about what he called ‘the scale of our solitude’ and outlining the many ills visited upon the people of developing countries by those who think that they are masters of others’ destiny.

He decried the inequality exercised in the non-recognition of some people’s efforts to rise against social ills as opposed to others whose efforts were axiomatically recognised by the world powers without a struggle.

“Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?” he asked.

“Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions….this my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.”

POWER OF LIVE GRENADE

His books carried in them the power of a live grenade. But what has never ceased to amaze about Garcia were mainly two aspects.

First, nearly all his books started with punchy and memorable paragraphs. Sample the opening paragraph in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

At that time, Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”

From there, the book cascades in a torrent of expressions and turns of phrase that, like a boat in the billows of a tempest, leave the reader helpless in the propulsion of the book.

In Love in the Time of Cholera, the opening paragraph describes the state of a man who committed suicide.

HILARIOUS

But this is told in a most hilarious way: “The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de saint-Ampour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.’

In Memories of my Melancholy Whores: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

In The Autumn of the Patriarch: “Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur’”

The other aspect is in how he manages to create memorable characters with queer habits and supernatural features.

Florentino Ariza, a love-sick character who has lived with the torments of love for Fermina Daza has to wait for 50 years for Daza’s husband to die for him to declare his love to Fermina.

When he learns of the death, Ariza does not need to offer condolences. Condolences are quotidian (daily) in the face of unbounded feelings of love. So he rushes to Daza’s house and utters these immortal word: “Fermina, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you, once again, my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jose Arcadio is presented as a man with immense strength and quite unusually endowed in his masculine department.

SUBTLE LANGUAGE

But it is in the subtlety of Garcia’s language that the reader is able to grasp, in an almost a cinematographic way, the extraordinary features of Arcadio and the awe he inspired in all the women who were unfortunate or fortunate to come across him.

At one point a gipsy woman accidentally looks at Arcadio’s features (Garcia describes it as “his magnificent animal in repose”) and exclaims “My boy, may God preserve you just as you are.”

Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is by all standards, Garcia’s way of laughing at himself and his society and also chronicling his own profligacies.

He tells of his unbridled sexual desire which one day drives him to steal upon a young Indian woman laundering clothes near him.

IRRESISTIBLE EXCITEMENT

Overcome by what he describes as irresistible excitement, he pulled her skirt over and ‘charged from behind’.

He was surprised to hear the woman exclaiming, ‘oh senor, that wasn’t made for coming in but for going out.’

Born in 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, Garcia was a master of word play.

He would describe the naughtiest of scenes with the most imaginable nimbleness of modesty but still leave nothing to the imagination.

He created memorable characters and scenes in his books and made it possible to blend our world as we know it with the fantastical universes in which his imagination excelled.

Waihenya is an author and Managing Director of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation