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The García Márquez Phenomenon
| Article
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14389 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
3,049 Words |
| Author
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Alfred MacAdam
Alfred MacAdam is professor of Spanish at Barnard College,
Columbia University. He is a translator, most recently of
Alfredo Bryce Echenique's Tarzan's Tonsillitis (2001), and
edits Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a
publication of the Americas Society. |
We read in the New York Times that One Hundred Years of Solitude has now become a full-fledged element in the zeitgeist. People use the book to strike up conversations: "Is this your first time? Oh, I remember when I first read it...." Characters in the novels of Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis aspire to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, give the novel to each other, occasionally open the book and peer at the odd page, but, of course, never go all the way. This confers on the text the status of classic; that is, a book universally esteemed--and beyond critical discussion.
The conclusion that no one actually reads One Hundred Years of Solitude would doubtless be unfair and inaccurate. Thousands of readers have found their way through the paperback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the one with the naked couple on the cover kissing in a jungle that discreetly rises to obscure their erotic embrace while titillating the reader's prurience. Misguided readers who judge books by their covers certainly must feel cheated when they reach the end, because García Márquez here renders sex so comic and ludicrous that the few steamy scenes he does include are innocent and harmless.
Excluding readers who buy the book as pornography or who receive it as an unbidden gift, the fact is that the reading public is still drawn to One Hundred Years of Solitude twenty-one years after it first appeared in Spanish. This is because the book is a fascinating carnival that combines humor, parody, social criticism, and the marvelous--all in one huge but lightning-fast narrative jaunt.
How Gabriel García Márquez came to be the author of this literary
... (1999 of 18070 Characters)
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