In an age where the written word was the monarch of all who surveyed it, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a magnet like few others. He was an author who had to be read for the sheer pleasure of reading, no locale too remote, beach or mountains, for flipping his novels’ compulsive pages. The term “magical realism” was possibly invented just to describe his writing, but that hardly matters!
Marquez said his genre embodied “myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena”, but you didn’t have to believe in myths or magic to enjoy the experience. You were transported to a surreal world far from the minutiae of quotidian existence. In fact, his best years were when right-wing dictators and left-wing revolutionaries battled for power in South America. He dabbled a bit in politics too, on the Left side.
The contradictions of life are never better accentuated than in his friendship with Castro, to whom he even sent drafts of his books, along with his closeness to Bill Clinton, who was on the other end of the political spectrum. There was, perhaps, poetic justice to all this, for as a writer, with the sheer force of his work, he could straddle the divide of a political world, although he drew flak for abandoning his native Colombia for Mexico. His writings, that embellished the likes of the Nobel-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) will, of course, live on.
