This Saturday, April 15, goes on the market in a hardcover edition and e-book Caribbean Troubadour, my first book in English. Published by Lexington Books (a division of Rowman & Littlefield), this book may interest all readers of Gabriel García Márquez and Latin American literature. If you have librarian friends (or a friend of a library), I’d appreciate it if you suggested they purchase it. I reproduce here excerpts from the introduction and the acknowledgments section.
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Este 15 de abril sale al mercado en edición de pasta dura y libro electrónico Caribbean Troubadour, mi primer libro en inglés. Editado por Lexington Books (una división de Rowman & Littlefield), este libro puede ser de interés para todos los lectores de Gabriel García Márquez y de la literatura latinoamericana. Si tienen amigos bibliotecarios (o bibliotecas amigas), les agradezco que les recomienden su adquisición. Reproduzco aquí fragmentos de la introducción y de la sección de agradecimientos.
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I started reading García Márquez when I was twelve years old, and almost half a century later I still have a vivid memory of the atmosphere of Leaf Storm. Outside of my school assignments, I had already read a couple of novels, one by Mark Twain and the other by Jules Verne, but García Márquez’s book made me feel closer to the characters and their background. I felt the warmth, the smells of the little Caribbean town in which the story took place. I identified myself with the little boy who was trying to understand the world of the adults and the rituals of death. The fact that the novel was originally written in Spanish, that the author of the novel was born in my own country, and that he still was alive, contributed to the excitement of that reading experience. Until then, I had the vague idea that one requirement to be a writer was to be dead.
I hadn’t finished reading Leaf Storm when I heard the news that García Márquez had just published a new novel. I was the first to check out The Autumn of the Patriarch in my high school library in Medellín, Colombia, but I couldn’t get past the second page. From that first reading, my memory just preserved the image of a group of cows on a balcony, eating the curtains of the presidential palace.
I decided to study journalism because I wanted to be a writer, and somewhere I had read that García Márquez became a writer through his experience as a news reporter. In college we read the op-ed articles he published in the newspaper El Universal of Cartagena de Indias, and I told my classmates— half jokingly—that I would be a journalist in El Universal, to begin where García Márquez began. To cut a long story short, a couple of years after graduating I was sitting in the newsroom of El Universal of Cartagena de Indias, fulfilling my own prophecy.
After the fictional town of Macondo disappeared in a cataclysm at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a stylized version of Cartagena de Indias called “the city of viceroys” became the setting for two of his novels and several short stories. Cartagena de Indias played a central role at the beginnings of García Márquez’s writing career. Although he lived in other Colombian cities (Barranquilla and Bogotá), and then in Italy, France, Venezuela, the United States, Spain, and Mexico, he always gravitated around Cartagena de Indias. His parents and most of his siblings moved to live there in the early 1950s. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, he built the house of his dreams in Cartagena. In Cartagena he wrote Love in the Time of Cholera. There he was a protagonist and had a positive influence on the International Film Festival (his famous “black notebook” gave him access to great writers and film directors, and everyone gladly accepted Gabo’s invitation to be part of the festival). There he established in 1995 his Ibero-American School of Journalism (Fundación para un nuevo periodismo iberoamericano, FNPI). As we will see in the chapter devoted to that city, Cartagena was, for García Márquez, like Fermina Daza was for his character Florentino Ariza, who “set out to gain fame and fortune to deserve her.”
While I was working for El Universal, between 1990 and 1998, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing García Márquez, who used to visit the city at least twice a year. In 1994, García Márquez published Of Love and Other Demons, his novel set in the eighteenth century Cartagena de Indias, then a prominent Spanish colonial seaport where different worldviews collided. In the foreword to the novel, García Márquez mentioned a particular event that supposedly occurred on October 26, 1949, when he worked as a reporter for El Universal. That was the starting point for me to write and publish, a year later, A Bouquet of Forget-Me-Nots (Un ramo de nomeolvides, 1995), a book about García Márquez’s beginnings as a writer and journalist in El Universal (1948–1950). The book included testimonies by García Márquez and his friends at the early stages of his writing career, as well as a selection of recovered texts written by him at the time and published without his signature. Some of those recovered texts are included—and published for the first time in English—in the second part of this book.
In December 1997, I had the opportunity to be García Márquez’s pupil in a workshop on Narrative Journalism offered by his school of journalism in Barranquilla, Colombia. That was the last time I met him personally. Soon after, I received a scholarship from Rutgers University to complete my master and doctoral degrees in literature. Since then, I have approached García Márquez works from a more academic perspective. Over more than two decades, as a graduate student and university professor I have taught, researched, and written extensively about García Márquez’s life and works, and have reflected about the themes and deeper structures of his books.
There were many circumstances along the way, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I am what I am (an exile from Medellín, one of the most dangerous cities of the world in the last century, who is now a university professor in the United States), and my life has been what it has been, because after reading Leaf Storm I did not stop reading its author’s books nor did I stop following with interest the events of his life. In the field of literary studies there is often controversy about the importance the life of an author can have for the understanding of his work. I have no doubts about it: the work matters because it is the expression of a person, and I never get tired of wanting to know about people I care about.
Born in 1927, a small and decadent town of the Colombian Caribbean, the vital trajectory of the “son of the telegrapher” is as awe inspiring as his own stories. By the end of his writing career, García Márquez was considered “the most prominent living writer in the Spanish language.”1 His relevance has not faded after his death, in 2014. In addition to the value of his literary works and the reputation associated with the Nobel Prize in Literature, García Márquez made multiple contributions to the journalism and the film industry in Latin America. He was a public figure at the international level. There seems to be no doubt that we will keep talking about his life and works the same way we talk about Shakespeare or Cervantes. For those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, the years after his passing have been a period of balances, of panoramic perspectives, in which his life begins to show a definite contour.
This book reflects the multiple perspectives from which I have approached the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez: as a regular reader, as an aspiring writer, as a journalist, as a biographer, as a scholar and, even, as his apprentice. Some chapters have the more rigorous and detached tone that we usually find in academic works; some others have a more personal approach. The variety of languages accounts for the relationship between life, work, and context. My intention is to offer a better understanding of the origins, creative practices, and prevailing themes in García Márquez’s fictional and nonfictional works. My general purpose is to contribute to the knowledge—in the English-speaking world—of one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century, not only from the scholar’s point of view, but also from the perspective of someone who can give direct testimonial accounts, and who shares his cultural and historical background.
And from the “Acknowledgments” (De la sección de agradecimientos):
The author gratefully acknowledges the newspaper El Universal, of Cartagena de Indias, for permission to reproduce in translation a series of unsigned text attributed to García Márquez; the Manuscripts Division of the Rare Books and Special Collections section, Firestone Library, Princeton University, for access to the Carlos Fuentes Papers; the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, for access to the Gabriel García Márquez Collection; to Carlos Alemán Zabaleta, for giving me a copy and allowing me to reproduce García Márquez’s letter of 1950 addressed to him; to Silvana de Faria, for her permission to publish here the text of the interview included in chapter 9; to María Alejandra Villamizar, Katia D’Artigues, Alexandra Cuervo, and Manolo Sarmiento, for permission to include their picture with García Márquez.
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the School of Liberal Arts and the Provost Office of the State University of New York, college at Oneonta, for their financial support during his research for chapters 10 and 12; and to the friends who contributed to this work in many ways over the years: Øysten Schjetne, Judith Nieto, Jaime Abello Banfi, Julio Aguilar, Gerardo Martínez, Julio César Posada, Magola Sánchez, Darío Gallo, and Óscar Collazos. My special gratitude to Sarah Donovan for her insightful observations and contributions to a manuscript that was so in need of improvement.
