Gabo

I heard the TV news report: Gabriel Garcia Márquez died today. If you’re a writer you know his name. I’m not a writer (blogs don’t count) but I am a reader, so I turned immediately to watch the story.

Gabriel García Márquez, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America, wrote many novels and short stories, among them One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. He made popular a literary style labeled magic realism, in which elements of magic are part of an otherwise mundane, realistic existence. But it’s the story of how he came to write One Hundred Years of Solitude that I want to recount now, because I think it’s a great example of how to know that someone is absolutely, unequivocally, a writer. This anecdote comes from Wikipedia:

“Since García Márquez was eighteen, he had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents' house where he grew up. However, he struggled with finding an appropriate tone and put off the idea until one day the answer hit him while driving his family to Acapulco. He turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing. He sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, and he wrote every day for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel ...”

I’m glad for him, glad his book was successful. But I don’t think García Márquez was thinking of fame and success as he wrote his book. He would have written that book regardless of the outcome. He wrote because a writer has a story in him that he must get out and onto paper, just as a poet has emotions that must find expression, as a painter has a vision he must capture on canvas. I say this as someone who has been, at different times in life, a story-teller, a poet, and even a painter. My efforts were a pale shadow of real talent like García Márquez possessed. But there were rare occasions when I felt for a moment that I had expressed something in words almost eloquent: that I had succeeded in saying something the way I felt it.  That is a good feeling.