gabriel garcia marquez Archives • The MG Harris Blog

Oh, but I’m a big old sucker for intertextuality. Which probably shows that deep down I’m a bit of a postmodern poseur.

I’ve mentioned this to my agent a few times – he seems to think it’s quite charming that I’ve buried references to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Borges and Haruki Murakami in my children’s adventure stories. Some of it happened quite unconsciously – I wrote the first draft so quickly that apart from the plot, which I constructed carefully, much of the writing came straight out of my subconscious without much modification. Some of it, however, is there quite intentionally, even structurally. I won’t say what.

Months later I looked back and thought – crumbs, what have I done? I’ve given away A LOT of personal information here – that anyone who knows me well will be able to deconstruct. (N.B. I removed quite a bit of this in the editing process). And what the heck is the point of all this intertextuality?

Why do we do this? My agent thinks it’s like a secret message to readers in the know.

Which begs the question – who do we write for?

A friend of mine knows the children’s author Philip Pullman, whose ‘His Dark Materials’ books are (in my opinion) the best children’s books ever written, along with The Chronicles of Narnia and the William books. Pullman allegedly told my friend once that in ‘His Dark Materials’ he’d written a book for adults that people as young as eleven also could read.

I guess I’ve written a book for teenagers that I hope they’ll re-read as adults and go ah…now I see where you got that. My books aren’t remotely similar to those written by my literary heroes, so it’s possibly too much to hope the people who read my books will go on to read Gabo, Calvino, Murakami and Borges.

But if they did, it would be so, so, so cool.

Oh, I’ve started keeping score of people I’ve persuaded (mainly by badgering) to start reading Murakami and now they really like him too:

In chronological order: David (my husband), Nathan (close friend), Steve (a writer friend), Martin (close friend), Rich (writer friend), Peter (agent). Hmm, all blokes. I have tried to persuade a few women friends but they haven’t gone for him in quite the same way.

I have one Murakami book left to read – After Dark. I am saving it up as a treat when I finish the current manuscript. And then it’s back to re-reading him, scouring the Web for rare short stories of his and generally being a sad fangirl.

Gabo vs Haruki Part 1: The Genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t see why one has to have a favourite writer. If I’m ever asked, how could I choose between Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Nope, it’s not a fair question. I cannot choose.

However, I can differentiate. Haruki moves me and Gabo astounds me.

(And Haruki also astounds and Gabo also moves, but each marginally less than the other…)

Garcia Marquez has these unforgettable openings, like the famous one in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

The power of that ending can only be appreciated much later in the book, when the reader realises (in my case with a shout of joy) that the Colonel, presumed dead (by the reader), only takes his full place in the story later on…And the way that the novel’s ending resolves the opening section with the gypsy’s manuscript is beyond genius, one of the few times in my life I remember being left literally breathless with admiration for a writer as I read him.

And that’s not the only time he uses the ‘Many years later’ formula. In his novels, linear time and cyclical time coexist; the stories are often simultaneously related at two levels.

I read recently probably the most influential Mexican novel of the last century, Juan Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Paramo’, a book allegedly adored by Gabo. Not only is Pedro Paramo an early example in Latin American literature of a novel told in two different time streams (the narrative alternates between a first-person narrator who visits the town where his father had lived, and a first-person narrator from the town’s past), but it includes this passage, which strikes a chord with any aficionado of Garcia Marquez:

“Years later Father Renteria would remember the night his hard bed had kept him awake and driven him outside. It was the night Miguel Paramo died.”

Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Paramo’ is brief yet dazzling. I myself have written whilst under its spell and can attest to its mesmeric hold.

I am reading the first volume of Gabo’s autobiography, ‘Living To Tell The Tale’. The opening, as ever, is delicious:

“My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived and she had no idea how to find me.”

What follows is an account, related with the characteristic shifting time streams, of young Gabriel’s visit to the old house of his grandparents in the distant town of Aracataca, from where his early childhood experiences were to inform the creation of his fictional town of Macondo and all its inhabitants. And the older Gabo now recognises with the trained eyes of the writer he has become (not yet a successful novelist, but definitely on the path), the material which has lain dormant within him all these years. It’s a moment of thunderous import and it shakes him to the core. The past, present and future collide during that visit. When finally he returns (some 100 pages later) to his cosy literary hangouts in Baranquilla with Colombia’s literati, he knows, even at 23, where this can take him.

I just read this great passage where Gabo relates showing a rough draft of his manuscript to a man highly respected within his writers’ circle: Don Ramon. Don Ramon reads two pages without change of expression, then makes one or two incisive technical comments. But as Gabo leaves him that day, Don Ramon adds:

“I thank you for your courtesy and I’m going to reciprocate with a piece of advice: never show anybody the rough draft of anything you’re writing.”

So, so, SO true. And Gabo followed that advice TO THE LETTER.

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