The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Mishima was regarded as a literary genius even by the great majority of Japanese who thought that his political beliefs were loony. His personal obsessions inform his writing to such an extent that his work really does not resemble anyone else's very closely, except insofar as a confessional attitude is one common aspect of modernism. His work was highly regarded by Kawabata, who befriended his much younger fellow writer and championed his career. The work of contemporary Japanese writers like Oe Kenzaburo and Murakami Haruki has clearly been influenced by Mishima^ style.

I recommend that you read Confessions of a Mask, and also The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a novel based on real events, in which a young monk, deranged by the American occupation of Japan, burns down a famous old temple to prevent it from falling into foreign hands. If you find yourself drawn into Mishimas weirdly brilliant mind, you might also want to try The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and his four-volume masterpiece and final testament, The Sea of Fertility.

J.S.M.

132

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

1928-

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Garcia Marquez and Borges [121] are usually considered the two world-famous Latin American writers of our time. The term magic realism is often applied to their work and to that of others of the same school, such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Argentinian Jъlio Cortizar, and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. The rather tired criticai clichк does suggest their slant on the world, which diverges sharply from the mainstream tradition of English and American fiction.

"Magic realism" was first used back in 1925 to describe a group of German painters who used precise literal techniques to image fantastic events flowering in the unconscious. These artists addressed the nonlogical element deeply buried in ali of us; and so do the contemporary novelists of magic realism.

Garcia Marquez speaks somewhere of "the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures." The phrase would seem perfectly acceptable to many South American and Central American writers. They have ali been affected, to the point of obsession, by the disorderly, often nightmarish history of their native lands. Thus, though their magic realism was also influ- enced by French symbolism and surrealism (and in Garcia Marquez's case by Faulkner [118]), it developed as a special technology of the imagination, designed to cope with the abnormal experience of a whole people.

One Hundred Years of Solitude traces the rise, decline, and fali of Macondo, presumably the authors hometown of Aracataca, Colombia. The era is marked by civil strife, frightful violence, political corruption, and the abuse of power. Five— perhaps seven—generations of the Buendia family compose the materiais with which the narrative is constructed. Over the years, first names (Aureliano, Josй Arcadio) recur, identities blur, family traits reassert themselves, making us feel that Macondo's life is cyclical, without forward movement, devoid of a goal. While the outside world of industry and progress at times touches them, essentially the Buendias remain immured in their sad and sometimes mad solitude.

Winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature, Garcia Marquez has spent much of his life as a working journalist. Thus he has a keen nose for fact; much of One Hundred Years is realistic enough. But the story is also full of ghosts, visions, monsters, prescient dreams, happenings contrary to nature (such as mass insomnia), a man two hundred years old, another returned from the dead, others who levitate.

The book is a kind of allegory of Latin American history, as much hallucination as family chronicle. Macondo is "the city of mirrors (or mirages)." Past and present fuse. One historian of the Buendia family, the author tells us, "had not put events in the order of conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they co-existed in one instant." Josй Arcadio Buendia, we learn, "was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room."

In its energy, its humor (for it has a kind of grim humor), its conscious exaggeration, its distortions of language, and its drive to transform human experience into myth, One Hundred Years recalls Gargantua and Pantagruel [35] as much as any title suggested in this volume.