Tag-Archive for ◊ Latin American literature ◊

Author:
• Sunday, March 01st, 2015

Juan Gabriel Vasquez was born on the northern outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia in 1973. He studied in Bogotá’s Anglo-Colombian school, then studied law in his native city at the University of Rosario. After graduating, he went to France to study Latin American literature at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1996 to 1998. He had in mind to pursue a literary career despite the fact that his father, who was a lawyer, wanted him, like his younger sister, to follow in his footsteps.

Vasquez has received several awards and prizes. In 2014 he received the International IMPAC Dublin award, as well as the Prix Roger Caillois in France and the Alfaguara Prize in Spain. He also received the Qwerty Prize in Barcelona for the best narrative Spanish language book and the Books and Letters Foundation Award in Bogotá in 2007 for best fiction book for Historia secreta de Costaguana, published in English in 2010. Vasquez is one of the most acclaimed writers, his books have been translated into several languages.

Vasquez has written a few novels as well as a brief biography of Joseph Conrad. He also translated works by E.M. Forster, John Dos Pasos and Victor Hugo to Spanish. After living in France and Belgium he now lives with his publisher and publicist’s wife and their young twin daughters in Barcelona.

The Secret History Of Costaguana is set between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s a mixture of reality and fiction in which the narrator, the novel’s main protagonist, José Altamirano, addresses the readers and his daughter Eloisa as a lawyer pleading before a jury. He makes arguments recounting the period during which the construction of the Panama canal was underway and makes claims that Joseph Conrad’s depiction of this historical era was filled with falsehoods.

The Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who successfully built the Suez Canal in Egypt, that opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction, thought he could achieve the same success by building the Panama canal. The French began excavating in 1882 but hit by tropical diseases such as yellow fever and malaria which decimated the crew and after nine years of persistence, corruption, miscalculation, fraud and loss of about twenty thousand lives, the project failed. The French effort ended in bankruptcy and a scandal coupled with a court case in France against Ferdinand de Lesseps, his son Charles and other people involved in the project who were found guilty.

Notwithstanding this defeat, the USA’s interest in the Panama canal was sustained and under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, The Panama Canal Company sold all its property to the United States which completed the Canal. It was opened in 1914 and “Colombia guaranteed the United States complete control of a 10-kilometre-wide zone between Colón and Panama City. The cession was for a space of one hundred years and in exchange, the United States would pay ten million dollars”.

The Colombian, Miguel Altamirano, saw it all and after his death his illegitimate son José Altamirano continued to witness all these events. The father being more optimistic than his son believed in the Panama canal project and as a journalist kept writing how everything was running smoothly, deliberately omitting mention of the appalling work conditions and the deaths of the workers.

José Altamirano, disheartened and sickened by all he has been through, leaves Panama for London in 1903. Soon after his arrival in London he is introduced to the British writer, Joseph Conrad, who has some difficulties moving forward with his novel Nostromo. The story is centered around a silver mine instead of a Panama canal and Nostromo is an Italian expatriate. The setting is South America in the mining town of Sulaco, an imaginary port resembling Panama in the occidental region of a fictional country resembling Colombia which he calls: Costaguana.

José Altamirano will be of great help to Conrad by disclosing the oppression, revolution and armed conflict he witnessed, including the political conspiracies and corruptions during “the one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of relentless slaughter” which he endured there and which destroyed him psychologically, leaving him with a guilty conscience.

In Vasquez’s novel the British Joseph Conrad is portrayed as a character and when Conrad’s Nostromo is published in a weekly magazine in 1904, Altamirano is appalled to note that the author has not mentioned him anywhere in his story. He says to him in anger: “You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me” he waves “the Weekly in the air, and then threw it down on his desk. Here he whispered…I do not exist…My tale lived there, the tale of my life and my land, but the land was another, it had another name, and I had been removed from it, erased…obliterated without pity.”
Conrad answers him: “This, my dear sir, is a novel” it’s not the story of your country, “it’s the story of my country. It’s the story of Costaguana.”

Through the voice of José Altamirano we recognise the voice of Vasquez who says: “History is a tale somebody has told us from a biased point of view; it’s only one possibility among many. Novels give another version, recover truths that have been repressed. The task is to make Latin America’s past come alive so we can gain some control over our future.”

This truth will be delivered by Vasquez himself. As an amendment to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Vasquez provides his readers, without “transformation or distortion”, the real history of this dark and tumultuous period of his own country which led Colombia’s province of Panama to secede in 1903, as well as the root and rift between the conservatives and the liberals during these bleak years.

Vasquez novel is a reaction against the magical realism genre, commonly used by south American novelists. Altamirano says derisively in the novel: “this is not one of those books where the dead speak or where beautiful women ascend to the sky, or where priests rise above the ground after drinking a steaming potion.”

The Secret Story Of Costaguana is a well documented and informative novel about the history of Colombia during the period of the building of the Panama canal. José Altamirano is an astute and sardonic story-teller, the only flaw of the book being the plethora of names of characters and politicians the reader needs to keep up with, a number that is well above average even by the standards of South American literature.

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Author:
• Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Arcataca in the north of Colombia in March 1928. His parents struggling to make a living,little Gabo was raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a Colonel, a liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, a hero and a very good story teller who lived an intriguing life.

His grandmother was full of superstitions, premonitions and ghost stories. She was also a very talented story teller and had the art of telling tales as if they were real.

Garcia Marquez will be deeply influenced by both his grandparents. Many years later he will use these unforgettable tales in his famous and most successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years Of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness.” Garcia Marquez will say later in his life: “I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents”.

When he was eight years old he went to live with his parents in Sucre, a department in the north of Colombia, due to his grandfather’s death and to his grandmother’s blindness. His father was a pharmacist. The young Garcia Marquez was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city in Colombia. He was known as the shy, serious, non-athletic boy who wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons. At the age of twelve he was awarded a scholarship in a Jesuit-run secondary school for bright students.

After graduating at eighteen in 1946, Garcia Marquez, to please his parents, enrolled in the Bogota University as a law student against his wishes. But he didn’t like his studies. He quitted university.

His life changed when he came across Kafka’s famous book “The Metamorphosis”. He says: “I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing long time ago… That’s how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice.”

From now on Garcia Marquez is going to read many books and dedicate his life to writing. He started his career as a journalist and moved unto literary writing.

He wrote fiction:
“In Evil Hour in 1962
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” in 1967
“The Autumn of The Patriarch” in 1975
“Love In The Time of Cholera” in 1985
“Of Love And Other Demons” in 1994
“Strange Pilgrims” (twelve stories) in 1992
“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” in 2004

His Novellas:
“Leaf Storm”, “No One Writes To The Colonel”, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” in 1961
“The General In His Labyrinth” in 1989

He wrote non- fiction:
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailorin 1970
The Fragrance of Guavain 1982
Clandestine in Chilein 1987
News of a Kidnappingin 1996
For The Sake Of A Country Within Reach Of The Childrenin 1998
“Living to Tell the Tale” in 2002
He also wrote many short stories.

In 1981 Garcia Marquez was awarded the French Legion d’honneur medal, and in 1982 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude had sold 36 million copies by July 2007.

Garcia Marquez has been married since 1958 to Mercedes Barcha and has 2 children, Rodrigo Garcia, the television and film director in the USA, and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, who also works as a title designer for the cinema in the USA.

In 1999 Garcia Marquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He lives in Mexico city.
He has released the first volume of a promised set of three volumes of his memoirs in 2002, “To Live To Tell It”, the story of his life till 1955.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a spell-bound novel with multiple events and stories. An epic, like La Chanson de Roland, it has its base seamlessly interwoven from reality combined with fantasy. A chronicle of life and death. A tragicomedy with many characters and through these characters we are introduced to the life of the mythical village of Macondo which is in reality the story of Colombia and its civil war between the Liberals and the Conservatives which had the peak of its bloodshed in 1899 and ended in late 1902.

And like his novella, “In Evil Hour”, where Garcia Marquez writes about the killing of a hundred and fifty thousand Colombians by 1953, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” Marquez describes the terrible massacre of a hundred thousand people with the defeat of the Liberals. Garcia Marquez’s grandfather fought in that war. He also wrote about the anti western massive workers strike against The United Fruit Company and their banana plantations in Macondo, and the massacre that followed.

The author has mixed together reality, fantasy and history with great magical success. The influence of Marquez’s grandparents is strongly felt in the book, with the raging war between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the mysterious gypsies, like the enigmatic Melquiades and his prophecies, and his ghost that kept on appearing and disappearing in the house. Also the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar who keeps on inviting itself into José Arcadio Buendia’s house after being killed by the latter because of jealousy over his wife Ursula. For many years after his death he will haunt the house in search of water to clean its wound and Ursula taking pity on him and leaving for him water jugs in every corner of the house.

The story of Macondo is the story of the people who founded the village from beginning to end during a hundred years. It all started with “twenty adobe houses,built on the bank of a river of clear water… It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and no one had died.” The head of the tribe was José Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran. They will have children, grand children and great grand children. Five generations of descendants, who all seem to follow the same pattern of character, each living his self imposed “solitude” and despair, their own way.

José Arcadio Buendia is fascinated by the unknown, sadly he is incapable of differentiating between magic and knowledge. He has his lab where he works and tries all sorts of inventions in the hope of making gold, till he ends up going mad.

Ursula Iguaran, his wife, is hard working, she cleans, cooks, and has a little business in candy animals, and raises the offspring of the Buendia family. She is strong-willed and remains lucid till her death at over a hundred years old.

It’s a gigantic saga where cruel and violent reality are mixed with a wholly fantastic world of the author’s fertile imagination. All the people killed during the war. Aureliano, the military leader, and his prolific sex life. He had seventeen children from seventeen women, all queuing to have heroes from him. The tragedies of Renata Remedios who couldn’t marry the man she loved, her mother’s guard fired a bullet into his spine “which reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest…tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies.” Renata Remedios was put by her mother into a convent for the rest of her life. The tragic death of Amaranta Ursula while delivering the baby she was carrying from her nephew.

Funny moments, like Mauricio Babilonia and his trail of yellow butterflies, the tricks that the grandchildren played on their nearly blind grandmother Ursula. And Remedios the Beauty who ascends to heaven with a sheet while hanging out laundry in the back yard. Not to forget the most unusual insomnia illness and collective amnesia, a weird “plague” that attacks the whole village, an infection from some Indians who were passing the village with gypsies.

Garcia’s style is easy, natural and simple. Without any doubt he mastered the art of magical realism. He skillfully blends the tragic and the comic in his astonishing novel where there is always a new amazing happening. Like a magician, under his wound Macondo becomes an enchanted village from The One Thousand And One Nights. Pungent with life, the surreal, undefined, uncertain, whether it’s time, place or people, seem to be most conventional in the novel.

Unfortunately, Macondo the village of mirages is cut off from any civilisation, it has prostitution, incest, and “Solitude”, so like its inhabitants it was doomed to disappear. The incestuous marriage of José Arcadio Buendia and Ursula and five generations later the relationship between Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt Amaranta Ursula, resulting in having a baby born with a pigtail, illustrate what Pilar Ternare,the fortune teller knew : “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”

Macondo the village of all fantasies goes back to oblivion with its inhabitants after witnessing a hundred years of violence, cruelty, love, passion, hatred, ghosts, fantasy, prostitution, incest, but most important of all, witnessing One Hundred Years of Solitude.

 

 

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