Latin American literature has given many literary giants who have contributed greatly to world literature. In today’s time, it would be a sin to speak of literature without talking about the literature carved in Latin America. There are many legendary authors behind its popularity around the globe, but Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo) is one of the foremost names among those writers. What made Gabo so special is the ordinary magic which he had mastered and showed to the world in the form of his enchanted verses. So to speak, Gabo was heavily influenced by William Faulkner’s writing style, whose shades we often see in his highly detailed environment; the spooky nature of the nights, the simple yet powerful Gothicism lurking in the windows or hanging from the virgin branches of chestnut trees. His symbols have been both simple and complex, but what made them interesting is the poetry wrapped around their neck like a necklace. There’s not a single motif Gabo sticks to the whole time, he processes multiple motifs to explain the gravity of the situation. The magic happens when he repeats them over a page, and redeems it almost then and there, breaking the preconceived notions about motifs and symbols. Now let’s talk about more magic. The tendency of the magic is to be extraordinary, beyond the laws of physics and nature and defying worldly logic to the point that the reason accepts it. But Gabo’s magic is different, it doesn’t trick the audience like a magician who turns a yellow ball into white pigeon or frees a bird from a cage and the cage gets filled with a random man from the audience. Gabo’s magic is symbolic, ordinary and contrary to the defining word itself, reasonable.
His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with a line:
‘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.’
There’s no literal magic in it, no tricks, no cage, no wand, and no pigeon, and yet, it still possesses the very qualities that define magic, in fact, it goes beyond the magic’s literal definition. Ice can be found, it can be sold and bought, it also can be produced, but to discover it makes it a rare thing, which it is not (well, not for us, but for Macondians it is). Gabo’s magic takes the ordinary thing from the routine (Ice here for example, or magnet in the later part of the novel), and takes it through the ladder of prose to the height of extraordinariness.
One Hundred Years of Solitude remains the best magical realist novel till date, many try to imitate its style, some people take the whole plot and make it grounded in their own country, their own village, but One Hundred Years of Solitude’s magic never fails to enchant the readers who are always ready to blown away by the extraordinariness of the ordinary magic, and the spells of ordinary places that become extraordinary.
“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
— Gabriel García Márquez