Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez Page B

is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself out of all proportion. This often presents serious problems for writers who can’t find words to describe it. If you talk about a river, the biggest one a European reader can imagine is the Danube, which is 1,770 miles long. How can the reader imagine the Amazon, which at certain points is so wide you can’t even see across it? The word “storm” conjures up one thing for the European reader and quite another for us. The same applies to the word “rain,” which cannot possibly convey the meaning of the torrential downpours of the tropics. Rivers with boiling water, storms which make the earth tremble, cyclones which sweep away whole towns are not inventions but the vast dimensions of the natural world in our hemisphere.
    MENDOZA : So you borrowed the myths, the magic, the exaggerated proportions from our own reality. What about the language? The language in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
has a sparkle, a richness, a profusion which you don’t find in your previous books, except for the title story in
Big Mama’s Funeral
.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : This may sound conceited, but in fact I’ve always been able to write like that. It’s just that I hadn’t needed to use it before.
    MENDOZA : Do you mean to say a writer can change language from one book to another as you change your shirt from one day to the next? Don’t you think language is an integral part of a writer’s identity?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : No, I think the theme of the book determines the choice of technique and language. The language I use in
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
, in
In Evil Hour
, and in
Big Mama’s Funeral
is concise, restrained, and governed by a journalistic concern for efficiency. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, I needed a richer language to introduce this other reality, which we’ve agreed to call mythical or magical.
    MENDOZA : And in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I needed to find yet another language and extricate myself from the one I used in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
    MENDOZA :
The Autumn of the Patriarch
is a prose poem. Were you influenced by your training in poetry?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : No, by music mainly. I’ve never listened to so much music in my life as when I was writing that book.
    MENDOZA : Which music did you choose?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : In this particular case, Béla Bártok and all Caribbean popular music. The mixture of the two had to be explosive.
    MENDOZA : You’ve also said that the book contains a lot of allusions and turns of phrase found in popular everyday speech.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : That’s right.
The Autumn of the Patriarch
is my most colloquial novel; it’s the closest to the themes, expressions, songs, and refrains of the Caribbean. It contains expressions only a Barranquilla taxi driver could understand.
    MENDOZA : What do you feel about your work in retrospect? Your early books, for instance.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I feel the rather paternal tenderness I mentioned before, the same thing you feel for children who’ve grown up and left home. I see those early books as faraway and defenseless and remember all the headaches they gave the young man who wrote them.
    MENDOZA : They were problems you’d solve quite easily now.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Yes, problems which wouldn’t be problems at all now.
    MENDOZA : Is there a thread which runs through both those early books and the ones which were later to make you world-famous?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Yes, there is, and I feel I need to know the thread is there inside and still needs protecting.
    MENDOZA : Which is your most important book?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :
The Autumn of the Patriarch
is the most important from a literary point of view, the one which might save me from oblivion.
    MENDOZA : You’ve also said it’s the one you most enjoyed writing. Why?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :