Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez Read Free Book Online Page B

enjoyed?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :
Il Generale de la Rovere
, by Rossellini.
    MENDOZA : Any other?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :
Jules et Jim
by Truffaut.
    MENDOZA : Which film character would you most liked to have created?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : General de la Rovere.
    MENDOZA : Which historical figure interests you most?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Julius Caesar, but only from a literary point of view.
    MENDOZA : And the one you dislike most?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Christopher Columbus. He’s really got
pava
. One of the characters in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
says so.
    MENDOZA : Your favorite literary heroes?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Gargantua, Edmund Dantes, and Count Dracula.
    MENDOZA : Which day do you dislike?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Sunday.
    MENDOZA : We know your favorite colour is yellow. But what shade of yellow?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I described it once as the yellow of the Caribbean seen from Jamaica at three in the afternoon.
    MENDOZA : And your favorite bird?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I’ve said that too. It’s
canard à l’orange
.
    3. WORK
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : In general, I think a writer writes only one book, although that same book may appear in several volumes under different titles. You see it with Balzac, Conrad,Melville, Kafka, and of course with Faulkner. One of these books sometimes stands out far above the rest so that the author seems to be the author of a single, primordial work. Who remembers Cervantes’s short stories? Who remembers
The Graduate Who Thought He Was Made of Glass
, for instance? But that can still be read with as much pleasure as any of his major works. In Latin America, the Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos is famous for
Doña Barbara
, which is not his best work, and the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias is known for
The President
, a terrible novel, not nearly as good as
Legends of Guatemala
.
    MENDOZA : If it’s true every writer spends his life writing a single book, which would yours be? The book of Macondo?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : You know that’s not right. Only two of my novels,
Leaf Storm
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, and some short stories published in
Big Mama’s Funeral
, take place in Macondo. The others—
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
,
In Evil Hour
, and
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
—are set in another town on the Colombian coast.
    MENDOZA : A town with no train and no smell of bananas.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : … but with a river. A town you can only get to by launch.
    MENDOZA : If it isn’t the book of Macondo, what would your one book be?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : The book of solitude. If you recall, the main character in
Leaf Storm
lives and dies in the most absolute solitude. Solitude haunts the central figure in
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
—the Colonel waits, Friday after Friday, with his wife and his cockerel, for a war pension which never comes. The Mayor who fails to win the town’s confidence in
In Evil Hour
is a solitary figure too. In his own way, he knows the solitude of power.
    MENDOZA : Like Aureliano Buendía and the Patriarch.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Exactly. Solitude is the theme in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
and of course in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
    MENDOZA : If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood, perhaps?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I think it’s a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously. I’m just another of them. Aren’t you?
    MENDOZA : Yes, I am too. Your first book,
Leaf Storm
, contains the seed of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. What do you feel now about the young man who wrote that book?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I feel a lot of sympathy for him becausehe wrote it in a hurry. He thought he wasn’t ever going to write again, that he