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Journalism of Courage
Gabriel Garcia Marquez delighted his language’s guardians – as well as a king and eight current or former presidents — with a classic starving writer story: How he managed to finish what many consider the greatest novel in Spanish since Don Quixote.
That would be One Hundred Years of Solitude, which the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language released in a special commemorative edition to honour Latin America’s most famous living writer.
Hailed by a crowd of 1,200 on Monday with a standing ovation and thunderous applause as he entered an auditorium in this colonial Caribbean port, the white-suited, mustachioed writer, who turned 80 this month, clasped his hands above his head like a prizefighter.
In a 13-minute speech, Marquez recounted how his wife Mercedes had to sell her jewels to pay the rent and put food on the table for their two boys during the 18 months it took him, writing every day without any income, to finish the novel.
The 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature recalled how he and his wife went to the post office to send the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude to his editor in Buenos Aires. They only had 53 pesos and it cost 82 pesos to send the parcel, so they split the manuscript into two and sent half of it.
“Afterward, we realised that we had sent not the first but the second part,” he said. Luckily, the editor, Paco Porrua, “was so eager to read the first half that he forwarded us the money so we could send the rest.” “To think that a million people would read something written in the solitude of my room with 28 letters of the alphabet and two fingers as my sole arsenal seems insane,” Garcia Marquez said,recalling that the novel’s readers have now surpassed 50 million.
Attending the tribute, along with scores of writers, journalists and academics, were King Juan Carlos of Spain, former US President Bill Clinton, Presidents Martin Torrijos of Panama and Alvaro Uribeof Colombia, former President Julio Maria Sanguinetti of Uruguay and four former presidents of this nation of which the writer is afavourite son, though he’s lived most of his adult life in Mexico City. “I believe he’s the most important writer of fiction in any language since William Faulkner died,” said Clinton, who recalled reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1972 when he was in law school and not being able to put it down.
It is the first novel in which Latin Americans recognised themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure, said Gerald Martin, a University of Pittsburgh professor who has nearly completed a biography of Marquez.
The special annotated edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude that went on sale Monday is only the second such volume produced by the Royal Academy after Don Quixote.
–FRANK BAJAK
