And FINALLY, a period.

I finally finish reading The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I feel like I have run a marathon up the highest mountain; endured sleeting rain in freezing cold temperatures wrapped in nothing but a measly scarf;  lived on twigs, gruel, and piss for nine months and survived it all. I want some medal.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is Gabo's third masterpiece...if you are counting Leaf Storm as one, which I am, and One Hundred Years of Solitude as two, which everyone else is (I have't read it yet).

It is an awesome and prodigious work. I see four layers in the story.

1. At its most basic, the story is a psychedelic oozing of mixed consciousness', a seething mass of point of view violations.

2. Next, it is like the most brain-bursting collection of metaphors, images, phrasing, words, and writing that I have ever attempted to digest. Often it left me staring at the ceiling, or out the window, or just plain dazed.

3. Then, there is the detailed riveting stomach-churning rubber-necking timeless classic essential portrait of the dictator. When I finish reading, I think...Gabo has captured the inner workings of every single dictator who as ever lived, still lives, is in diapers, and is yet to be born.

4. And the hard reading of the sentences that go on forever, and there is no respite, and you think just the onslaught of all the words is going to make you go crazy which makes the structure of the novel as inaccessible and inscrutable as the psyche of the subject itself.

Wow.

I am left with memories of that patriarch wearing the denim uniform without insignia and the gold spur on the left heel, who is always dragging his feet through the government house full of chickens and cows to the latrines where he and no one else writes on the the toilets long live the general, long live the stud who after selling a sea, sought in native science the only thing that really interested him which was to discover some masterful hair-restorer for his incipient baldness whose life had been seen in the  premonitory waters of basins by his mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado of my heart, he was as deaf as a post not only because I would ask him about one thing and he would answer about another but also that it grieved him that the birds were not singing when in fact it was difficult to breathe with that uproar of birds which was like walking through the jungle at dawn and they created newspapers and tv shows for him just the way that he liked them and every night he slept in his office behind three bolts, three locks, and three bars which is where they finally found him stretched out on the floor, face down, his right arm bent under his head as a pillow where he had realized at the moment of his death his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands and in the invisible code of the cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power.

And FINALLY, a period. That is kind of how you start to feel, and by the end of the book, you are gasping, yearning, craving, needing, dying for that little dot.

Brilliant. But not light. Very heavy.

I am going to indulge in something  extra-super-duper-extremely lite and fluffy for my next read.

Thank you Gabo, wherever you are, for giving up the law. You and Gaugin.

the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited...

I am determined to finish The Autumn of the Patriarch and Gerald Martin's biography of Gabo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Life. But The Autumn of the Patriarch is not an easy read and the biography is thick.

Right now Marquez is in Mexico. He's been working in the news, advertising and movie industries. But it seems his soul yearns for its primary language...literature...

I always thought that the cinema, through its tremendous visual power, was the perfect means of expression. All my books before One Hundred Years of Solitude are hampered by that uncertainty. There is an immoderate desire for the visualization of character and scene, a millimetric account of the time of dialogue and action and an obsession with indicating point of view and frame. While actually working in cinema, however, I came to realize not only what could be done but also what couldn't be done; I saw that the predominance of the image over the other narrative elements was certainly an advantage but also a limitation and this was for me a startling discovery because only then did I become aware of the fact that the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited.

I just about salivate over these words, because I understand, and I agree that "the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited."

That is why we keep reading, that is why we keep searching. That is why the shelves of ereaders all over the world are bursting with books.

The human mind thrives on novelty...we will always crave new stories...and the possibilities are unlimited.

Ah. The master has spoken.

The Last Story in Leaf Storm...

Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait is a love story between silence and song. A mute girl who drools and a black boy who sings.

When the horse kicks Nabo in the head and that angel calls him to join the choir, he can't leave until that girl cranks the gramophone one more time, shouts his name--the only words she can say--and sets him free.

At least...that's how I read it.

It's the last story about Macondo, so I'm left a little droopy. Endings are always bittersweet and this one's no different.

But...was the saxophone player an angel before or after he died?

Gabo sang.
Maybe he still does.
Maybe Gabo goes to the square every Saturday night to sing in that choir and hear that black angel play the sax.
That would be an ending more sweet than bitter.

Did you hear that?
It's so quiet.
The Leaf Storm has passed.

Who Would Sell a Sea?

There are things that I have learned along the way. One is: No one else can tell the truth of your life. It's because we all have filters, and see things in our own way. So, whenever someone says she did this because of that or when that happened, it may or may not be true. Because they don't really know, do they?

Given that truth, a biography, read with an appropriate sense of caution, can be a fascinating thing.

From Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin ...

... he began to collect the details which would eventually make a dictator of his own come to life, fleshing out the obsessions with power and authority, impotence and solitude ... Mendoza recalls that his tireless friend spent a lot of time in those days reading about Latin America's seemingly interminable list of tyrants ... gradually developing a profile of boys without fathers, men with an unhealthy dependence on their mothers and an immense lust for taking possession of the earth ...

and then we get this ... in The Autumn of the Patriarch ...

... it was thought that he was a man of the upland plains because of his immense appetite for power, the nature of his government, his mournful bearing, the inconceivable evil of a heart which had sold the sea to a foreign power and condemned us to live facing this limitless plain of harsh lunar dust where the bottomless sunsets pain us in our souls.

I mean ... WTF.
Who would sell a sea?

It's just me and the words Gabo wrote...

Then I get to Monolgue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo.

It's a steady drip-drip, just like the rain. I want to take a nap. Like when it's raining.

I worry about that poor cow ... that could not fall down because the habit of being alive prevented her ... And really, like Isabel, I never thought the woman ... asking, every Tuesday, for the eternal branch of lemon balm ... would make it through the deluge. But she did. And then there was the sick woman who'd ... disappeared from her bed and had been found floating that afternoon in the courtyard.

So who fell in the well?

I don't know. But I feel like I finally get IT.

The Leaf Storm. The leaf trash. Macondo.
The awareness glows inside me like a smile.
I don't have a degree in English.
I am not sitting in some classroom.
There is not a blackboard within reach, sight, or walking distance.
The professor is at the university. Not here, in my room.
No, it's just me and the words Gabo wrote.
Brilliant.

Six Pages, One Long Line...

I am reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin. It's a slow road. There's not a lot of poetry. There are lots of facts, and names, and places. But it's a biography, and it's thorough.

I love the passages that speak directly to Gabo's writing, even better when he's quoted:

There's not a line in any of my books which I can't connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to concrete reality.

This is an important insight to another writer. Maybe to a reader, too. But the first time I read it, it flies right over my head like a startled bird. I drop the book in my lap and laugh.

Because I have just finished reading The Last Voyage of The Ghost Ship... six pages, one long line.

That Gabo, he's got a wicked sense of humor.