Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and moviemaking Easygoing, jaunty and humble, as if he were completely unaware of his universal stature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Aracataca, Colombia, 1928) came last month to Cuba to attend the 25th Havana New Latin American Cinema Festival and take part in major events until the premiere of some new movies based on his latest works, bearing out once again the profound respect and admiration of the Cuban public for a man who's known better as a writer than as a filmmaker. Nevertheless, in both fields he seems to make no defined boundaries or draw dividing lines, just like the Buendia's offspring in A Hundred Years of Solitude. By means of movies, the author has managed to narrate how he has cottoned on to the down-to-earth fact that novels have unlimited possibilities.
His linkage to the film industry is far-reaching and sundry, ranging from the making and scripting of screenplays to the adaptation of many of his works to the big screen. Countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia have turned Gabo's works into box-office hits.
As chairman of the New Latin American Cinema Foundation, Garcia Marquez and his committee of moviemakers meant to be a source of inspiration and support for the creation of Cuba's International Movie and Television School back in 1986, an institution whose toilsome efforts have begun to pay off.
Garcia Marquez's narrative realm One of his many narrative virtues is extreme and ever-growing concision. The Colombian author is convinced that “the problem about literature is words,” and asserts his language is not Colombia's, but his grandmother's. “Because that's how she used to speak,” he says.
As far as the peculiarities of the world he portrays in his narrations, critics have pointed to a number of possible influences –even from writers Garcia Marquez himself has confessed he's never read any of their works. But perhaps the most revealing aspect of all is the conviction the author has over the unity of the world painted by Latin American novels. Regardless of influences, whether real or not, that unity has found true expression through a sensibility seasoned by environments and ambiences, characters and circumstances, all with common roots.
On the other hand, words like magic, fantasy, exuberant imagination abound in virtually all essays about Garcia Marquez's narrative style. This is what the author has to say about this issue: “That's the way Latin America is; completely fantastic even in the trudge of daily life. This is the continent of bizarre imagination, of delirium, and of chimerical and hallucinating solitude. My characters are true as long as they reflect this fantastic reality.”
No wonder, then, that the brilliant novel that put his name on the world map –A Hundred Years of Solitude- was born as a kid with a pig's tail out of incest; that a priest could levitate a few centimeters off the floor after drinking a cup of hot chocolate; that Remedy the Beauty, after shaking a bed sheet, got lifted to heavens, or that in the heart of Macondo's jungle, an abandoned galleon popped up unexpectedly. Is this magical realism? Is there any poetic transportation of reality?
Embarking on literary debates is not out business here, but rather focusing on the one-and-only features of a universe brimming with seemingly unusual traditions and extravagancies strongly ingrained in the Latin American reality. “We live in a continent where daily life is made up of realities and myths. And we are born and live in a world of fantastic realities.” Thus, armed with a huge swatch of imagination but from the angle of a sharp watcher willing to feast his eyes on reality, Garcia Marquez's work is one of a kind in the realm of Hispanic and universal literature of all time.
Español
English
Français
Deutsch
Italiano
Русский