Discovering Ice

"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."

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Today is the 85th birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I can't let this day go by without writing something about what his two most well-known works "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love In the Time of Cholera" mean to me. It's something deeply affecting and not entirely able to be explained - like magic.

I devoured "100 Years of Solitude" and I was not sated. I read through most of Marquez's works, fascinated by this type of writing I knew somehow from reading works by Borges and Rushdie and Murakami, but hadn't known were considered magical realism. 

I didn't give much thought to the labels applied to literature besides fiction and non-fiction, but "Solitude" changed me. It opened my eyes to a way of discovering literature that I'd never bothered with, but suddenly I couldn't get enough of. I Google'd my way around the Internet compiling lists of authors who wrote in the genre like Miguel Angel Asturias, Isabelle Allende, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Mikhail Bulgakov, Italo Calvino, Robertson Davies, Gunter Grass, Kafka, Ben Okri, Jose Saragamo, and Kawabata. 

One scan of my bookshelves and I can see the path that Marquez's work set me upon that was littered with masterpieces I might not have stumbled upon otherwise. 

Asturias' "The Mulatta and Mr Fly" and his children's book "The Talking Machine". His works were so difficult to find I got a membership to The American Library to read "Mulatta". I spent months searching online for an affordable copy of the first edition of "The Talking Machine" (which runs anywhere from $60 - $150 but I snagged on eBay for $3). 

I loved Allende's "House of Spirits" so much that I wrote her an email to tell her, to which she graciously responded and encouraged me to write a book of my own. Allende's TED Talk is undoubtedly one of my favourites. 

Through Casares I discovered a link to Borges who was already a favourite. Their work "The Book of Fantasy" is something I found on ABEBooks for a pittance and would rescue from a burning house. Through Casares and Borges I discovered Alberto Manguel's "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places" - one of the greatest books ever put to print and also worthy of rescue from flames.

I could go on about books I discovered and rediscovered because of the spell "Solitude" cast upon me. I in turn have always pressed it into people's hands, though I know the style and story isn't for everyone. Please, I have urged people, just give it a read. It might change you forever.

Before "Solitude" my mind didn't really understand the freedom the writer has at their fingertips. I'd buried my nose too long in books that were all realism and no magic. I reread  "The Chronicles of Narnia" almost in secret because I thought it was silly to read such things when I was attempting to be the author of serious literature. 

I wanted the notches on my belt of being able to claim to have read "Ulysses" (I've made many attempts and never made it past a few pages) and the other sort of books you hear people discussing at parties to show off. And while I've read many of the books that should give me the right to strut around parties like a pretentious peacock, it's not exactly my style to judge someone based on their taste in books, but I was still worried that somehow if I didn't have the right resumé I was somehow obviously going to turn out to be a shit writer.

After finishing "One Hundred Years of Solitude" I started writing a book. It was the first version of the book I've been trying to write ever since. Not to be like Joyce or Hemingway or Miller or Nabokov, but to simply write a book that one day might have the impact on another in that way that "Solitude" did on me.

Feliz Cumpleaños Señor Marquez y muchos gracias for this book that began with the discovery of ice and brought me to that instant where I began to decipher that I was living.

If you're interested in some of the other books that I've loved, you can find a Henry Miller inspired list here.