Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s tall tales

London — The Colombian novelist Alvaro Mutis used to tell a story about his close friend and compatriot Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who has died aged 87. In the mid-’60s, when the latter was writing One Hundred Years Of Solitude, they met every evening for a drink. Garcia Marquez would tell Mutis about the scenes he’d written that day, and Mutis would listen, waiting avidly for the next instalment. He started telling their friends that “Gabo” was writing a book in which a man called X did Y, and so on. When the novel was published, however, it bore no relation to the story Garcia Marquez had told over tequila — not the characters or the plot or any aspect at all. Mutis was left with the feeling of having been brilliantly duped and he mourned the unwritten novel of the bar, that ephemeral fiction no one else would hear.

It would have been a good anecdote no matter who the writers were, but it’s particularly apt in the case of Garcia Marquez, who could hold innumerable tales in his head and spin them simultaneously. The oral novel offered to Mutis was a kind of enactment of the principle on which Garcia Marquez’s books were based: That what is passed down and told to you, however unbelievable, is part of your history; and that what we naively call lies can be far more true than facts.

His first novel to put this into practice was One Hundred Years Of Solitude, his best-known book, and the one that set him on the path to winning the Nobel Prize in 1982. Garcia Marquez said he had the idea for it while driving to Acapulco in Mexico. He had written a couple of novels and some stories already, but this time it occurred to him that he must write in a tone inherited from his grandmother, in which fantasy and folklore were conveyed in the same breath as gossip or news of a local murder.

According to the self-made myth, as soon as this thought occurred to him, Garcia Marquez turned the car around and drove back to Mexico City, and his wife, who’d been looking forward to their holiday, didn’t see him again for two years.

Until then, Garcia Marquez had been a journalist. But he didn’t exactly invent the style that made him famous. The success of One Hundred Years Of Solitude made especially visible something that other Latin American writers such as Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso and Alejo Carpentier were doing too, turning against the tenets of 19th-century French fiction, refusing to write sub-Zola naturalism and embracing instead the freewheeling imagination of the countries in which they were born.

Though the influence of Garcia Marquez has been great, it’s difficult to assess accurately. The fact that a novel written in Spanish, about a remote, non-existent town in Colombia where a family is visited by ghosts and almost nothing is told straight, has sold over 50 million copies worldwide has been an extraordinary coup for international relations. But in literary terms, he has spawned imitators who have not always produced works of high quality.

What he has done, perhaps more indirectly, is open doors for other writers to incorporate ways of seeing and telling that the going styles of realism would not have allowed. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (about the family of an escaped slave in the aftermath of the American Civil War) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (about the family of a child born at the moment of independence in India), are very different in their settings, but take similar narrative liberties and see history in a comparable way: They are guided by the idea that we are born of more than a sum of facts.

MAGICAL REALISM

Those comparisons raise another question: How helpful a term is “magical realism”? Is it to do with the world described or the tone permitted? The phrase was coined in 1925 by a German art historian, and its application to Latin American literature, while now widespread, has been contentious.

It is true that the continent is full of what seems like magic to foreigners and like ordinary life to locals. If, as in Garcia Marquez’s fiction, a child with the tail of a pig barely merits a second glance but a railway train is a miracle, the terms “magic” and “realism” are up for grabs. Depending on whether you live in a country where a firing squad is an aspect of the everyday but you have never seen ice, different parts of the famous first sentence of One Hundred Years Of Solitude will strike you as strange: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice.”

For that reason, One Hundred Years Of Solitude isn’t the same book in English as it is in Spanish. In the original, it is funny, ironic and full of grim humour that mimics the way people talk to themselves. But it’s despairing in the end. In English, it was wholly new: A liberation.

So it may be more useful to think about Garcia Marquez’s achievement in terms of forms of storytelling, rather than focusing on the curiosity of local worlds. When asked about the influence of Garcia Marquez on his own writing, Salman Rushdie once said that his affinity was not for magical realism but with “the people for whom the processes of naturalism have not been sufficient”. Among those, he included Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass and Milan Kundera as well as Garcia Marquez. For that — for untethering us from the mundane and teaching us to tell our tales taller — Garcia Marquez should be remembered and thanked. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH