A TALK WITH GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

 

"His grandfather, Garcia Marquez said, was ''a former colonel who told endless stories of the civil war of his youth, took me to the circus and the cinema and was my umbilical cord with history and reality.'' Grandmother was ''always telling fables, family legends and organizing our life according to the messages she received in her dreams.'' She was ''the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality.'' 

His stories, he recalled, often started from one initial visual image. '' 'Leaf Storm,' for example, began from a flash of myself as a little boy, sitting on a chair in the living room,'' he said. The initial image for ''No One Writes to the Colonel,'' he went on, came ''when I saw an old man looking at fish in the market of Barranquilla.'

'For ''The Autumn of the Patriarch,'' ''my only book which I have not lived myself, I read everything I could about Latin American and especially Caribbean dictators over a period of 10 years. On top of that I talked with whomever I could who had a related experience. Then I traed to forget everything and forced myself to work purely from my imagination so that no event could be linked to a real one. But the dictator became the most autobiographical character of all. Excluding the aspect of power, which I have not known, of course, many of my personal feelings, obsessions, ideas, nostalgias, superstitions, are attributed to the patriarch. No doubt there are affinities between power and fame. I think the loneliness of power and the loneliness of fame are much alike.'' 

read the interview with Marlise Simons :

A TALK WITH GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ