Tag: South American Literature

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Many years later, as she faced the esplanade, Miracle Romano was to remember that distant afternoon when her bestfriend took her to discover Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Rather than a rereading, this felt more like a revisit of our teenage years. Nostalgia accompanied me on every page. These characters who ushered us into adulthood were so real to us then. They lived in our conversations and in our heads, they colored our loves and we went through growing pains with them. Yellow flowers raining down from narra trees of Cebu’s Osmeña Boulevard would often transport us to the day of Jose Arcadia Buendia’s death. Magic realism was delivered to us by a master; it was new to us and it was… magic!

(Who was crazy enough to think they could make a successful screen adaptation?)

But how could we have dismissed how unhinged the characters actually are? How did I, a young girl, go through the depictions of sexual violence unfazed; or was I too innocent to know what that’s actually like in real life? How could we not have known that the banana company strike which led to the massacre that Jose Arcadio Segundo witnessed and which drove him to madness was a real event in Colombia; and that the banana company was relatable for Filipinos in the way first-world corporations exercise control over developing nations? And was it from GGM where GRRM drew inspiration for the aunt-nephew bonds?

But Gabo is the real Melquiades. He brought us magnets, magnifying lenses, astronomical observations, and mercurial storytelling. It was he who made imagination and literary possibilities flourish in the fertile and pristine Macondos of our minds, and who never really died.

Read Gabo when you’re young and you don’t know better. But also read Gabo when you’re older, to realize that what was Sanskrit in our innocence was ultimately a revelation about politics, time, memory, and history — “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” — because one day you can only wish you could read Gabo again for the first time as a juvenile and simply resign to the fact that the book you are reading is a literary masterpiece.

Laura Esquivel: Like Water for Chocolate

A quick and enjoyable re-reading of my initiation to the flavors of Latin American magic realism — in anticipation of Salma Hayek’s production of the upcoming series adaptation.

Recommended by my best friend in our early teens, this is the book that led to highschool years enlivened and colored by the novels of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. This is also the book that made the kitchen a more magical place for me. 

Reading this with older eyes shows me how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve outgrown, and also how much I did not understand back then: It seems to be oozing with more sensuality now. The romantic passages are no longer what strike me the most. When John Brown encourages Tita to express herself through writing and thereby carving her path to freedom, I realize that nothing Pedro ever did could top that and I was rooting for the wrong man all along. Now I’m no longer concerned about whether the adaptation is faithful to the love story, I’m more concerned about how faithful it is to the kitchen magic.

“My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves… Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn’t find out what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted.”