BOOKS
A new map of the Indies
HENRY TUBE
It seldom falls to a reviewer to acquaint his readers with the name of a novelist almost certainly new to most of them, and to declare in the same breath that he is the author of a classic on the grandest scale. The name is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in Colombia in 1928, and the novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude (Jonathan Cape 35s), published in Argentina in 1967, published here, in a splendid translation by Gregory Rabassa, this week. Sr Garcia Marquez is the author of three earlier novels and a book of short stories, but it is not surprising that he is little known in Britain, since, apart from two stories in collections of Latin American writing and one in the Christmas 1967 issue of the SPECTATOR, this is his first work to appear in this country.
Although Sr Garcia Marquez is one of a glittering constellation of contemporary Latin American novelists—there are fleeting references in this novel to Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar and Mario Vargas Llosa, while the more senior genius of Borges presides throughout— and al- though he acknowledges the influence of Conrad and Faulkner and even calls one of his characters Stevenson, the most obvious comparison is with Homer's Odyssey. This is neither as inflated nor as recondite a claim as it may sound: One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book to be judged by the very highest standards, but it is not a learned book, in the sense of needing expositions, footnotes, keys to understanding; rather its appeal is popular (already a bestseller throughout Latin America, it will surely be- come one here too) and for much the same reasons as the Odyssey.
In the first place, Sr Garcia Marquez is a spellbinder. His manner has that peculiar combination of compact energy with sly digression that one associates with the natural storyteller. Not that his method is any more unconscious than Homer's, but there is a strong flavour of the oral about it, of the author making it up as he goes along out of a sense of equal confidence in the bottomless store of material at his corn- mand and his own unflagging, powers of invention. His basic unit is the anecdote and he is so prodigal of it that he seems some- times in danger of using up the material for several books on a single page; but just as the Odyssey always strikes one as a very short book, so the reader emerges at Sr Garcia Marquez's 422nd and last page with a feeling that he has scarcely got into his stride.
The truth is that this author is a great weaver, running his anecdotes under and over one another, re-introducing familiar patterns in altered circumstances, playing variations on old colours with new tones and shades. The first impression of prodigality soon gives way to one of astonishing economy, for the anecdote that seems to be thrown away on one page is given a fresh airing forty pages later, is made to bifurcate and proliferate like som2 furiously fertile plant. The central image is indeed that of a tree, since the chestnut tree under which Jose Arcadio Buendia spends the last years of his life, is also the family tree of the Buendias which for a hundred years bur- geons, flourishes and withers at the centre of an isolated town called Macondo, founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia himself somewhere between the Andes to the east, a great swamp to the south and west, and the Caribbean to the north.
The confusing names of his male issue through five generations—Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadia, Aureliano Jose, Arcadio, Aureliano Segundo, Jose Arcadio Segundo, Jose Arcadio, Aureliano—naturally assist the author's tree-like technique; and at the very moment when the reader has begun to pride himself on at least distinguishing the Aurelianos from the Arcadios, the author himself admits: 'While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the Jose Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising', only to twist the trunk of his tree on the very next page by introducing a pair of identical twins, Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo, who begin by swapping clothes and named bracelets at school, grow up to display the wrong tendencies, Aureliano those of an Arcadio, Jose Arcadia those of an Aureliano, and are finally buried in each other's graves, or perhaps, after all, in their own.
But the real secret of One Hundred Years of Solitude, as also surely of the Odyssey, is its mixture of the marvellous and the every- day. Some good writers can invent fantasy, others can catch the minutiae of ordinary life, but only the greatest can stir the two to- gether without causing themselves a nasty accident. Success depends on the writer's having an imagination delicate enough to select the crucial detail, the bubble which will contain a whole area of natural experi- ence (Odysseus, for instance, automatically spinning a false tale about himself to the disguised Pallas Athene when he first sets foot again on Ithaca), and at the same time original and sustained enough to fill the bubble with fantasy and blow it right off the earth without disturbing his proportions. One of the females of the Buendia family is called Remedios the Beauty, sweet and simple-minded, but so beautiful that men go mad at the sight of her. She is helping her sister-in-law Fernanda (of aristocratic line- age, but with a crabbed, suburban nature), her great-aunt Amaranta, and her great- grandmother Ursula, to fold sheets in the garden. Remedios the Beauty suddenly goes very pale and her aunt asks if she is feeling unwell: '"Quite the opposite," she said, "I never felt better." She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembl- ing in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o'clock in the afternoon came to an end ... Fernanda, burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle, and for a long time she kept on praying to God to send her back her sheets.'
It may be that in isolation here the miracle seems to overtop the petticoats, the dahlias and four o'clock in the afternoon, but in its context, half-way through the novel, this floating vision of sheets and saint seems no more out of place than would a baroque altarpiece viewed from the back of a church where three thoroughly solid old women were praying in the nave. Sr Garcia Marquez takes his too literally-minded reader firmly in hand from the start. The gipsies who are the first visitors to find a way through the swamp to Macondo bring a variety of novel- ties to astonish the isolated inhabitants: a magnet, a telescope, a magic carpet, and ice. The magic carpet is by far the least interest- ing to Jose Arcadio Buendia, who is some- what put out to be told that his amazing scientific discovery that the world is round is already established fact elsewhere. The gods do not appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude as they do so frequently in the Odyssey, but the dead are apt, from time to time, bound to the trunk of their greatest obsession in life, like Jose Arcadio Buendia to his chestnut tree, to walk and talk with the living. Even Death appears once, 'a woman dressed in blue with long hair, with a sort of antiquated look', and sits sewing in the porch with Amaranta Pernanda was present several times and did not see her, in spite of the fact that she was so real, so human, and on one occasion asked of Amaranta the favour of threading a needle.'
But the effect of these intrusions of the miraculous goes far beyond the merely baroque, the pleasure in florid decoration for its own sake; because of the way Sr Garcia Marquez uses them, as outcrops of the mundane, he is able to enlarge and universalise what, without them, would be a simple tale of ordinary small-town life, how- ever sensitively rendered. The Buendias are small-town people, as Odysseus and Pene- lope are, but they are also mythical creatures, their scale equally that of a monumental landscape and of the human figure, in the manner of a sculpture by Henry Moore.
The landscape Macondo subtends is noth- ing less than South America, that travel brochure 'land of contrasts' with a venge- ance. From long before the novel opens, when Ursula's great-great-grandmother, liv- ing in a city on the coast which was attacked by 'the pirate Sir Francis Drake', became so frightened that 'she sat down on a lighted stove'; through the accidental discovery by Jose Arcadio Buenclia in the jungle beyond Macondo of an ancient Spanish galleon ('Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hang- ing from ils intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids'); the adventures of his roving son Jose Arcadio ('In the Caribbean he had seen the ghost of the pirate ship of Victor Hugues, with its sail torn by the winds of death, the masts chewed by sea worms, and still looking for the course to Guade-
lupe'); the coming of the railway to Macondo ('Something frightful . . . like a kitchen dragging a village behind it'); the depreda- tions of a North Amei ican banana company and the bloody aftermath of a worker's strike, when men, women and children are • massacred in the town square; to the final aktinction of Macondo in a hurricane; the history of South America looms behind the family saga of the Buendfas.
But this double vision of the mythical and the human finds its sharpest focus in the development of Colonel Aureliano Buendfa, who 'organised thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all' and who is at last told the truth about himself by his friend and political enemy, General Moncada, whom he is about to execute: . . . out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.'
In One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez has brought off what every great writer must sooner or later attempt, the true and living portrait of his own people in their time and place.
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