The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Philip Swanson is an analytical book containing essays by eminent literary scholars on the fictional works of Garcia Marquez. Penetrative essays by Donald Shaw, Robin Fiddian, Steven Boldy, Raymond Williams, Claire Taylor and Gerald Martin have made this book a highly educative text for students and pedagogues scrutinizing the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927—2014), one of the most vital Colombian authors, hardly needs to be introduced. His masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminated him with fame right after its publication in 1967. One Hundred Years of Solitude is viewed as one of the greatest literary works of all centuries and all disquisitions on Latin American literature remain incomplete without citing this novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude established Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an outstanding author of the world and it ornamented him with Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. One Hundred Years of Solitude is an indispensable book for a deeper look into the rise of civilization in South America and humans' settlement across the Caribbean Islands. Moreover, this novel movingly deals with the horrors of civil wars in some parts of Latin America, the exploitation of native Colombian people by foreign companies and a passionate love story and all these things are found proceeding through seven generations of the Buendia family in a fictional town called Macondo. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a superb artist of magic realism in fictional works, particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Magic realism refers to a narrative technicality in literature in which miraculous or paranormal events are portrayed like ordinary day-to-day phenomena while it depicts mundane incidents like supernatural fantasies. The term "magic realism" was first introduced by German art scholar Franz Roh in 1925. 

According to the essays compiled in this book, solitude is a recurrent motif in most of the stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude is located in the remote jungles of Colombian rainforest, far away from the rest of the world. People living inside that far-off village are hardly recognized or noted by the rest of the globe, as the novel shows. Similarly, in No One Writes to the Colonel, another best-known book by Garcia Marquez, we find a former colonel of Colombian army leading a very solitary life with his sick wife. The colonel was a valorous military officer during his years in combat uniform and he set a good number of heroic examples on the battlefield for his country. But after retirement he and his wife are left in deep monetary shortage. The colonel waits years after years for his pension, a healthy amount of money the government had promised him, which doesn't arrive. He domesticates a rooster which he intends to put in a cockfight contest of his village with the hope that if the rooster wins it can get some money for its master. The colonel waits for the postman everyday but he never turns out to be lucky enough to receive any good message from the government. No One Writes to the Colonel tells the story of the dreams we believe in, the hopes we count on and how deeply it hurts when those dreams and hopes end up like a wild goose chase and turn into useless fancies. 

In Innocent Erendira, a highly acclaimed short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, readers get introduced to a beautiful girl who goes through unspeakable hardships under her ruthless and immoral grandmother's disposal. Her grandmother forces her to give sexual pleasure to people to earn money. The sufferings and tribulations of Erendira touch the hearts of all readers. The story closes with Erendira picking up enough guts to stab her grandmother one night and running away with a man who had come to have sex with Erendira but instead falls in love with her and motivates her to escape with him from her vicious grandmother's house. Love taught Erendira to fight back and love has the charisma to become a lethal weapon anytime to instigate people to strike back at repression, this story suggests. 

Love in the Time of Cholera, Leaf Storm, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, The Autumn of the Patriarch are some other esteemed novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez while Living to Tell the Tale is his autobiography.

The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez addresses another narrative strategy implemented by Garcia Marquez—metafiction. Metafiction stands for synthesizing fictional components with non-fictional disciplines like history, anthropology and geography. Gabriel Garcia Marquez exercised metafiction in some of his novels including One Hundred Years of Solitude. Most of the books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez were translated into English by veteran translators like Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman who were able to retain the original appeal of Garcia Marquez's tales while converting the books from Spanish into English language. 

The reviewer is Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Metropolitan University, Sylhet.