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The Colombian novelist Alvaro Mutis used to tell a story about his close friend and compatriot Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who has died aged 87. In the mid-Sixties, when the latter was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), they met every evening for a drink. Garcia Marquez would tell Mutis about the scenes he’d written that day, and Mutis would listen, waiting avidly for the next instalment.
He started telling their friends that “Gabo” — as Garcia Marquez was affectionately known — was writing a book in which a man called X did Y, and so on. When the novel was published, however, it bore no relation to the story Garcia Marquez had told over tequila — not the characters or the plot or any aspect at all. Mutis was left with the feeling of having been brilliantly duped, and he mourned the unwritten novel of the bar, that ephemeral fiction no one else would ever hear.
It would have been a good anecdote no matter who the writers were, but it’s particularly apt in the case of Garcia Marquez, who could hold innumerable tales in his head, and spin them simultaneously.
The oral novel offered to Mutis was a kind of enactment of the principle on which Garcia Marquez’s books were based: that what is passed down and told to you, however unbelievable, is part of your history; and that what we naively call lies can be far more true than facts.
His first novel to put this into practice was One Hundred Years of Solitude, his best-known book, and the one that set him on the path to winning the Nobel Prize in 1982. Garcia Marquez said he had the idea for it while driving to Acapulco in Mexico. He had written a couple of novels and some stories already, but this time it occurred to him that he must write in a tone inherited from his grandmother, in which fantasy and folklore were conveyed in the same breath as gossip or news of a local murder. If only he could combine that with what he’d learned from reading the first sentence of Kafka’s Metamorphosis — “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect” — with no indication that anything unrealistic was about to be announced, then he would arrive at the style he had in mind.
According to the self-made myth, as soon as this thought occurred to him, Garcia Marquez turned the car around and drove back to Mexico City, and his wife, who’d been looking forward to their holiday, didn’t see him again for two years.
