Finding memory and magic in the ‘lost’ novel of Gabriel García Márquez

19 July 2024

Until August, Gabriel García Márquez, Penguin/Viking Gabriel García Márquez and I started badly. In my first year at university, I studied Spanish. More honestly, I should say that I enrolled in the course. The teachers threw us in the deep end and, from Day One, they spoke only in Spanish. This included our eccentric Irish professor, Wally, who occasionally read snippets of Joyce to us in Spanish. After class, we went to the café for coffee and conversation. It was a great way to learn a language, but I wasn’t keeping up. To use an expression to which I sometimes resorted on school reports, I was a distracted student. In that year, we were set to read a short novel by Garcia Márquez (1927-2014), In Evil Hour (1969). At once I saw my chance to catch up. I went to our local library and borrowed the book in English. The problem was that my Spanish was so poor that I borrowed the wrong book, presuming that La Mala Hora must have meant Leaf Storm (1972) as that was the only book available that seemed about the right size. I realised my mistake when I had trouble with the assignment and sought advice from Wally who, for the first and only time, drifted from Spanish into whatever language includes the expression ‘feckin’ eejit.’

Thus I ended up reading two books for the price of one and, disdaining to slow my progress by trying to read Spanish, I was utterly captivated by the brittle world that Garcia Márquez creates, held together only by the paste of his exuberant storytelling and his underlying belief that the more improbable something was, the more likely it was to be true. I was even more entranced when a friend urged me to read One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). I won’t forget the wet weekend I spent unable to leave the pages of that book. People speak of lost weekends, but for me this was one of finding. I have since met people who have had exactly this experience. The less believable his stories, the more impossible it was to disbelieve them. How did he do it?

There are many clues in Garcia Márquez’s extraordinary memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (2002). It begins with Garcia Márquez, in his early twenties, returning with his mother to sell the house she owned in the small town of Ararcataca in northern Columbia.

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Finding memory and magic in the ‘lost’ novel of Gabriel García Márquez

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