Gabriel Garcia Márquez
It’s been half a century since the publication of 100 Years of Solitude, the book that helped establish Gabriel Garcia Márquez as an icon of magical realism. The story of the town of Macondo and the Buendia family has loomed large since, with its narratives of time and the inexorable ties of the past casting an unforgettable spell on all who’ve read it. My first brush with Gracia Márquez, however, was a later book, Love in the Time of Cholera, first published in 1985. From the onset, I was drawn to the languidity of the prose, and the slow unfolding of events and characters. Lush and fecund with embellished sidesteps and detours, this story of enduring love, human foibles and the past is told with sumptuous style and a fine line between fact and the fantastic. For me, however, the high point of Garcia Márquez is Living to Tell the Tale (2002), the first of a projected three-book autobiography that was, alas, uncompleted at the time of his death in 2014. One uses the word “autobiography” guardedly, though, as the very epigraph warns: “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Yet, here is the sum of it all: lyrical in the quintessential Garcia Márquez way, magical in the way it composes the world, ostentatious, extensive and expansive, and larger than life. Much in Living to Tell the Tale are echoed in 100 Years of Solitude, further blurring the line between truth and fiction. Life, Garcia Márquez seems to be saying, isn’t always straightforward, and when it’s as gloriously chronicled as this, there’s really no need to fret the difference. – Christy Yoong
