R., you set me the task of reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude ahead of my visit to Bogotá in the Spring of next year. And ahead of schedule the task is complete. ‘Márquez’ is of course one of the most important cultural ‘exports’ for Colombia and so it makes sense I should finally get around to reading the book (which has sat upon my shelf expectantly for years).

Márquez was born in 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, ‘where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts’ (Biography…). He studied at the University of Bogotá and went on to be a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and travelled to New York and numerous European cities as a foreign correspondent (echoes of which arise in the novel). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. However, it is far more than this biography of a prominent Colombian that need concern us. Márquez is also a writer of many layers that clearly we can share in the same way we have Flaubert, Proust, and Barthes, as well as film-maker’s such as Wenders, Wong Kar-wai, Keiller and Greenaway.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a long, magically woven novel, the sort of book that if you put it down for too long only results in needing to start all over again. Fortunately I did not have to read in solitude and when it was all over, this is what I sent by ’mail’ (to the one whose ‘floating world’ has reacquainted me with reading fiction for fiction’s sake):

Yes, 100 is now over for me… Or has just began, since I am now starting to ask myself what it is I have been reading all this time. I suppose in the postmodern ‘tradition’, I have just been reading a book that is the book it refers to – in other words I have been reading Melquiades’ sanskrit parchments all this time, and like the constant battle to dechiper them I am now only just at the beginning of knowing what the book might contain… Dare I read it again? …but that will only put me in the position of needing to read it again, and so on and so on, ad infinitum…

In some respects I could have been satisfied with the first 60 or so pages. The book’s magical realism (for which it is so well known) is subtly opened out, with frames within frames of familial memories and episodes of alchemy. The book is the story of the Buendia family and the town they help found, Macondo. As the backcover notes: ’Part exotic paradise, part nightmare, Macondo is a fantastic world of miracles and mirages where nothing is as it seems. Its secrets lie hidden for years in an encoded book, and only Aureliano Buendia, the last in the dynasty, can unlock its mysteries and discover the fate of this strange land…’. I don’t think it is really to give anything away to cite from the close of the book:

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish dechipering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

The book is unrepeatable – it is an event, not a story book. It stays with me in a way that few books can. I inhabit its landscape and the house at the centre of it all. The fluidity of its mise-en-scene equally conjures up my own past, my family and my memories. In that sense the book is unrepeatable, it can only be my version of the book (I am now its ghost), it has come to inhabit me, as much as I inhibit it.

There are two important recurring motifs to mention, one utopian, which is never realised and the other dsytopian, which troublingly is written out of everyone’s memory. The former is a motif of an unrealised city of ice. The opening line of the book: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’ – proclaimed by Jose Arcadio Buendia as ‘the great invention of our time’: ‘When it was opened … the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with the infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into coloured stars’.

     Jose Arcadio Buendia dreamed that night that right there a noisy city with houses having mirrors walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day he convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot on the bank, and there they founded the village.
      Jose Arcadio Buendia did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice. Then he thought he understood its deep meaning. He thought that in the near future they would be able to manufacture blocks of ice on a large scale from such a common material as water and with them build the new houses of the village. Macondo would no longer be a burning place, where the hinges and door knockers twisted with the heat, but would be changed into a wintry city.

The ice factory is never built and subsequently this vision of a wintry city is never realised. Instead Macondo remains a heated, contested space. War rages around it and most troublingly of all a surreal massacre (being the dsytopian motif) takes place following a street protest by union leaders and the workers on strike: ‘…something happened that did not bring on fright but a kind of hallucination. The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived’. Yet, hours later, the only ’survivor’ of this event is Jose Arcadio Segundo who wakes up in darkness to realise:

…he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep … There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had, and those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them up in the same way in which they transported bunches of bananas.

Jose Arcadio Segundo eventually escapes from the train and makes his way back to Macondo, but bizzarely finds that no one believes him about what has happened. He spends his time trying to find out what really went on (if anything at all, for had it been a dream?) and to determine how no one seemed to believe it or wish to speak of it. As the book is at this point beginning to near its end (in one’s hand, one feels the pages already read now undoubtedly outweighing those left to be read) there is a vague sense in which this mystery will eventually be resolved. Concurrent with my reading of the nove, a story, which has been around for sometime, appeared in The Guardian about ‘death squads’ targeting union leaders in Bogotá. The story relates specifically to bottling plants used by Coca-Cola, with the unions claiming that ‘the company’s locally owned bottlers in Colombia used illegal paramilitary groups to intimidate, threaten and kill its workers’ and which in turn has led to an attempted boycott of Coca-Cola products around the world (More…). Mark Thomas’ book Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola (see also Channel 4’s Dispatches) considers this story in more detail. It is a murky tale, which appears hard to pin down (just as the ‘fictional’ account of the massacre in Márquez’s novel). The timing of the appearance of this report, coinciding with my reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, gave an added twist to the novel’s very last line: ‘…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth’. One hundred years later, as it were, the solitude continues, or is it only repeated? Like the call of ‘Macondo’, Coca-Cola has no inherent meaning, yet its ’supernatural echo’ rebounds through our capitalist ’Empire’ (to take Hardt and Negri’s term). But I don’t want to give up on that wintry city, not yet, not when literature itself might still manage to show us other pathways.

Yet, Literature and Empire (as befits the ‘logic’ of the latter) must collide. Rachel Aviv’s article for Salon.com, 100 years of solitude — on crack, neatly encapsultes this in its subheading: ‘Latin America’s McOndo literary movement drags the butterflies of magical realism into Burger King. With Jorge Franco’s narco-saga “Rosario Tijeras,” it may have found its first masterpiece’.  She explains:

     Alberto Fuguet, the young Chilean author who is responsible for coining the word “McOndo,” respects García Márquez but resents the idea that to be perceived as Latin American one must write like him. [...] Fuguet and several other so-called McOndians, most notably Pedro Juan Gutierrez, Mario Mendoza and Edmundo Paz Soldán, came back (in a wave of recent and forthcoming English translations), but their work in no way resembles García Márquez’s. If anything, their style is a cross between Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski – Chandler in their depiction of the city as a kind of protagonist, Bukowski in their appetite for large doses of provocative, unsavory details: fucking a corpse in a junkyard, peeing on a former lover’s face, scenes of mass masturbation.
     This generation has yet to produce a standout, world-class figure as the one before did, but many hopes have been pegged on Jorge Franco. In 2000, Franco’s “Rosario Tijeras,” which has just been translated into English, won Spain’s most prestigious literary prize. As reported by Silvana Paternostro in the magazine Críticas, Franco made an extraordinary deal with his publishing house in order to get the manuscript into print, promising to pay for all promotion and publicity himself. He peddled the book personally, dropping it off at newspapers and magazines. “He ran into the wife of the editor of El Tiempo, Colombia’s main newspaper, in an elevator and gave her a copy, asking if she would pass it on to her husband,” Paternostro wrote. “Two weeks later, he got an admiring phone call from the editor, who promised to do something. But Franco never thought the editor would dedicate an entire column to ‘Rosario Tijeras.’” The book sold out in two days and since then has has sold more than 300,000 copies in Latin America and Spain – unprecedented for any Colombian writer other than García Márquez. (Rachel Aviv)

Franco’s book has since been made into a film and the English translation of the book is endorsed by Gabriel García Márquez himself, with the line: ‘This is one of the Colombian authors I would like to pass the torch to’. But, as Aviv notes, ‘[w]hen people die in the book it is not because of beautiful, biblical butterfly plagues, but because of acts of street crime – narco-terror’. As I write I await the arrival of copy of the book, which I ordered just the other day (a means of extending my preparatory reading, ahead of coming to Bogotá). I’m really not sure if I want to read the book, but it seems I should: 

Franco depicts street crimes, bar brawls, police brutality and poverty, and yet at times his world – one of profound disillusionment and anger – appears just as grotesque and fantastical as does his literary forefathers’ magical ones. Whereas magical realism was a form premised upon nostalgia for a premodern world that has passed or is passing away, Franco’s literary style shrilly acknowledges the presence of modernity: He depicts a recognizable society shaped and permeated by pop culture, mass media, urban growth and the forces and influence of globalization. To return to the present is to reckon with a reality that is, for many, absent of enchantment and magic. As Max Weber once put it, the realistic novel constitutes the “disenchantment of the world,” and in moving from magical realism to realism, in emerging from under the long shadow of García Márquez, this Colombian author attempts to do justice to his profound disillusionment. (Rachel Aviv)

R., in coming to Bogotá, I’m imagining a whole city of ice awaits our explorations… though I know, with that must come the dilemma of whether or not to avert one’s gaze from yet another place, ’shaped and permeated by pop culture, mass media, urban growth and the forces and influence of globalization’.