only had this one chance, so he tried to put all his accumulated know-how into the book, particularly the literary techniques and tricks heâd borrowed from the English and American novelists he was reading at the time.
MENDOZA : Virginia Woolf; Joyce; Faulkner, obviously. The technique of
Leaf Storm
is very like that of Faulknerâs
As I Lay Dying
.
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : Itâs not exactly the same. I use three perfectly identifiable viewpoints, although I donât give them names. Thereâs an old man, a boy, and a woman. You can see that
Leaf Storm
and
The Autumn of the Patriarch
have the same technique and the same theme (attitudes to a dead man). The difference is that in
Leaf Storm
I didnât dare let myself go and the monologues conform to too strict a pattern, while in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, I use multiple monologues, sometimes within the same sentence. By the time I reached this book, I could fly solo. I let myself off the leash and did whatever took my fancy.
MENDOZA : Letâs go back to the young man who wrote
Leaf Storm
. You were twenty.
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : Twenty-two.
MENDOZA : You were twenty-two, you were living in Barranquilla, and you wrote the novel, if I remember rightly,working very late at night in the editorial offices of a newspaper after everyone else had gone home.
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : In
El Heraldo
.
MENDOZA : Yes, I know those officesâneon lights, ceiling fans, always extremely hot. Right outside was a street full of underworld bars. The Calle del CrimenâCrime Street. Do they still call it that?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : Thatâs right, La Calle del Crimen. I used to live there, in one of those hotels for casual customers which are really brothels. The room cost one peso fifty a night.
El Heraldo
paid me three pesos per column and sometimes another three for an editorial. When I hadnât got the one-fifty to pay for the room, I used to leave the manuscript of
Leaf Storm
as a deposit with the hotel porter. He knew that I valued those papers highly. A long time afterward, when I had already written
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, I came across this porter among the people whoâd come to see me or ask for my autograph. He remembered everything.
MENDOZA : Did you have any trouble getting
Leaf Storm
published?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : It took me five years to find a publisher. I sent it to Editorial Losada, a publishing house in Argentina, and they sent it back to me with a letter from the Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre advising me to concentrate on other things. He did, however, recognize something in methat now gives me a lot of satisfactionâa definite feeling for poetry.
MENDOZA : I think Iâve heard you say that something similar happened in France. With Roger Caillois, if Iâm not mistaken?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ :
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
was offered to Gallimard a long time before
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. There were two readersâJuan Goytisolo and Roger Caillois. Goytisolo, who wasnât the good friend of mine then that he is now, wrote an excellent readerâs note. Caillois, on the other hand, rejected the book outright. I had to write
One Hundred Years of Solitude
before Gallimard became interested in any of my books. But by then my agent had other commitments in France.
MENDOZA : Between
Leaf Storm
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(i.e.,
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
,
In Evil Hour
,
Big Mamaâs Funeral
), your novels suddenly became realistic, restrained, more limited both in construction and use of language, and they contain neither magic nor anything outrageous. How do you explain this change?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : When I wrote
Leaf Storm
I was convinced that every good novel should be a poetic transposition of reality. But, if you remember, that book appeared during a period of very bloody political repression in Colombia and my militant friends gave me a terrible guilt complex. âYour
MENDOZA : Virginia Woolf; Joyce; Faulkner, obviously. The technique of
Leaf Storm
is very like that of Faulknerâs
As I Lay Dying
.
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : Itâs not exactly the same. I use three perfectly identifiable viewpoints, although I donât give them names. Thereâs an old man, a boy, and a woman. You can see that
Leaf Storm
and
The Autumn of the Patriarch
have the same technique and the same theme (attitudes to a dead man). The difference is that in
Leaf Storm
I didnât dare let myself go and the monologues conform to too strict a pattern, while in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, I use multiple monologues, sometimes within the same sentence. By the time I reached this book, I could fly solo. I let myself off the leash and did whatever took my fancy.
MENDOZA : Letâs go back to the young man who wrote
Leaf Storm
. You were twenty.
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : Twenty-two.
MENDOZA : You were twenty-two, you were living in Barranquilla, and you wrote the novel, if I remember rightly,working very late at night in the editorial offices of a newspaper after everyone else had gone home.
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : In
El Heraldo
.
MENDOZA : Yes, I know those officesâneon lights, ceiling fans, always extremely hot. Right outside was a street full of underworld bars. The Calle del CrimenâCrime Street. Do they still call it that?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : Thatâs right, La Calle del Crimen. I used to live there, in one of those hotels for casual customers which are really brothels. The room cost one peso fifty a night.
El Heraldo
paid me three pesos per column and sometimes another three for an editorial. When I hadnât got the one-fifty to pay for the room, I used to leave the manuscript of
Leaf Storm
as a deposit with the hotel porter. He knew that I valued those papers highly. A long time afterward, when I had already written
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, I came across this porter among the people whoâd come to see me or ask for my autograph. He remembered everything.
MENDOZA : Did you have any trouble getting
Leaf Storm
published?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : It took me five years to find a publisher. I sent it to Editorial Losada, a publishing house in Argentina, and they sent it back to me with a letter from the Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre advising me to concentrate on other things. He did, however, recognize something in methat now gives me a lot of satisfactionâa definite feeling for poetry.
MENDOZA : I think Iâve heard you say that something similar happened in France. With Roger Caillois, if Iâm not mistaken?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ :
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
was offered to Gallimard a long time before
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. There were two readersâJuan Goytisolo and Roger Caillois. Goytisolo, who wasnât the good friend of mine then that he is now, wrote an excellent readerâs note. Caillois, on the other hand, rejected the book outright. I had to write
One Hundred Years of Solitude
before Gallimard became interested in any of my books. But by then my agent had other commitments in France.
MENDOZA : Between
Leaf Storm
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(i.e.,
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
,
In Evil Hour
,
Big Mamaâs Funeral
), your novels suddenly became realistic, restrained, more limited both in construction and use of language, and they contain neither magic nor anything outrageous. How do you explain this change?
GARCÃA MÃRQUEZ : When I wrote
Leaf Storm
I was convinced that every good novel should be a poetic transposition of reality. But, if you remember, that book appeared during a period of very bloody political repression in Colombia and my militant friends gave me a terrible guilt complex. âYour
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