Edgar Alan Zeta-Yap, 21, was born and raised in Cebu City. He is currently finishing a five-year master’s program in Integrated Marketing Communications at the University of Asia and the Pacific. He plans to be a creative director in an advertising agency someday. But his incessant forays into a variety of extracurricular exploits attest to an artistic disquiet within, ensnared in the trappings of the corporate world. He is also a watercolorist, and a stage actor and production designer for student theater.
It has become an anticipated annual event, an "institution" if you will. Lights are low, and spirits high (or, rather, are on the loose). Huddled around Magandang Gabi Bayan during Halloween nights, we crave for a long lost mystique, hands swimming in corn chips, teeth in foggy chatters, rekindling the very magic our lolas and yayas once summoned to shush us to dream time: spooky stories, folklore and fairy tales stitched from memory, hearsay and imagination to fashion a precious drapery of verbal heritage with a teetering life of its own. I, too, was once an avid listener, and still (now and then) relish a spontaneous round of the goose-bumpily peculiar among friends. Such penchant for the mysteries of the otherworldly lured me to pore over voluminous readings of the paranormal, of UFOs, the Roswell incident and the sort, convinced that "truth" is indeed stranger than fiction, and oblivious to the profundity of literary magic, of the eloquent wizardry of a certain Colombian novelist who can rightfully herald the spellbinding powers of fiction.
Sure enough, I chanced upon Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Gabo as he is called. In the epic One Hundred Years of Solitude, which catapulted him to international fame and paved his road to earning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, I was first immersed in a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are blurred with the nonchalance of skilled narration, long before Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame. Before you know it, with the affirmation of Love in the Time of Cholera and 26 of his short stories in Collected Stories, I officially caught Gabo fever.
Inspired by his grandmother’s fantastic storytelling and the casual absurdity of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad), written in 1967, steadily weaves a century’s history of the Buendia family in the mythical village of Macondo. Driven by his folkloric narration, this obra maestra seamlessly fuses the believable with the uncanny in a literary style cultivated by Latin American writers called magic realism – a postmodernist approach that is now quite tame for our Harry Potter-hyped generation, but nevertheless more lyrical in its subtlety. As years unfold, gypsies ride on flying carpets; insomnia plagues the whole town; a dead man’s flowing blood finds its way towards his mother’s house (my favorite); and a lovely virgin ascends to heaven body and soul. Garcia Marquez narrates the strangest of occurrences with his grandma’s "brick face." Chronicling five generations, the viscous plot meanders through the settlement’s origins, struggles, zenith, decadence and demise. From the humorous marriage of Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, to the stunning Remedios the Beauty, and the unfortunate Aureliano Babilonia, the characters dramatically enter and exit the Macondo stage in this all-embracing Latino soap opera of intertwined lifetimes, grander than those we obsessively patronize on the boob tube.
Unlike Lola Basyang’s tales or its three-chaptered Kafkan muse, the Nobel Prize winner’s work is definitely one hefty read. I am easily intimidated by chunky books like this one, but when this novel was compared to the Book of Genesis as "required reading for the entire human race," my reluctance was quickly overwhelmed by such curiosity that I breezed through more than 450 of its pages on a busy week. This epic is a grand tapestry that represents not only Colombia’s neocolonial socio-politics but also, more significantly, every man’s history: a continuous string of friendships and rivalries, opulence and poverty, madness and sanity, war and peace. Embellished with enchanting motifs, smooth, worn-out, and coarse here and there, fibers fray and remain open-ended. It is easy to get lost in all the detail, and the Buendias’ persistent practice of naming their children Aureliano and Remedios adds up to the confusion, despite the conveniently laid-out family tree. In due course, this immense book can be one of two things: either a dragging fabrication or, in my opinion, an invaluable antique.
Solitude is a summer bedside book that you pick up now and then to read a chapter or two, and not the kind you wolf down in a few sittings (or else, like me, you will suffer literary indigestion). As you work your way through, its poetry grows on you. Patience is vital because time does not always take flight in Macondo. It crawls, whispers, trembles and pulsates with a fairy-tale existence of its own. Charting a rhythm savage, sensual, strange and sad, Garcia Marquez imperturbably paints an intimate portrait of civilization – a "city of mirrors" where we behold all of life’s tribulations, triumphs, trivialities and truths – until his last words, the forceful stroke, linger in meditative afterthoughts.
As you lock your brain waves on this masterful epic, Gabo reaffirms the fluency and range of his writing in Love in the Time of Cholera (El Amor en los Tiempos del Colera), his 1985 novel of lifelong devotion in the midst of pestilence and loss. Recently, this book gained renewed attention after appearing in the romantic Hollywood flick Serendipity. Like its predecessor, Cholera meanders through a verdant landscape, albeit at a fairly faster pace. Spanning a lifetime at the heart of the hustle and bustle of a seaside Caribbean town, this modern classic pursues the exploits and entanglements of Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and her wealthy husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino: a love triangle put to a close by the Doctor’s sudden death, after Floro’s 51 years, nine months, and four days of waiting. He struggles with the remaining years of his life to prove his "eternal fidelity and everlasting love" (in spite of his six hundred and twenty-two "long-term liaisons" with other women) in order to redress his days of perversity and solitude, and to win back the girl of his youth.
Though his trademark magic realism is kept at a bare minimum this time around, Garcia Marquez still enthuses his readers with this tale of love against the odds of time, death, and fatality, through fluid narration, the richness of a turn-of-the-century South American setting, and the intimacy of his rounded characters. This novel is a notable exception to the aversion of some for romances, managing to stir the emotions minus the cheesiness of clichés. The author’s portrait of the unnamed tropical town, faced with the pressures of modernity, draws one into the nostalgia of an era gone by, without boring the reader in meticulous detail. What’s more, the lead characters, so much fewer than those in Solitude, are not pigeonholed cutouts but complex individuals, each dueling with the protagonist and antagonist within and without themselves. As a love-struck telegraph operator who, in cholera-like fits of passion devoured roses and feverishly wrote numerous letters for the haughty Fermina, Floro would be a pitiable sight to behold.
From the prelude of "bitter almonds" to the songs of river manatees, Gabo possesses the unique ability to enchant and submerge the reader in his writing. And in a culmination that celebrates an irrevocable bond weathered and polished by an abrasive world, we learn that "love becomes greater and nobler in calamity," in the reckless abandon of the human condition, finally outgrowing the funny and fickle trappings of puppy love.
In Solitude and Cholera, this pioneering magic realist draws significantly from the reservoir of his experiences to construct a world both strangely familiar and historically prosperous, one that we can call uniquely Garcimarquesian, a world not distant from our own Spanish historicity, and the local myths and superstitions that still inhabit our national psyche: our very own musings of ghosts, engkantos, witches, dwendes and the lot. Trailing the sources of his fiction, one finds the many inspirations behind his literary magic brimming in his compelling first installment of a planned autobiographical trilogy, Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir Para Contarla), published in 2002. From his birth in Aracataca, Colombia – the real-life Macondo of his literature – on March 6, 1927 to his itinerant exploits as a struggling journalist finding his own voice amidst the political strife and poverty of a war-torn nation in the 1950s, the Nobel Prize winner chronicles the early events, localities, and people that have nudged, enthused, and bemused him to become one of the master storytellers of our times.
"My life," Gabo confesses, "was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer." As in his fictional works, Gabo scribbles with the confident expressiveness of a keen observer of the physical world. Although many nuances are inevitably lost in translation, the English version, like most of his works, evokes the romanticism and melodic tonality of the Spanish language, owing to the smooth rendition of Edith Grossman.
I was astonished by how much of the unusual occurrences in his life story find themselves later on transformed into his writings – a case of art imitating life. How ice discoveries, earth-eating sisters, ash-crossed visitors and banana massacres are beckoned and immortalized in black and white. Certainly, one would gain a greater admiration for his autobiography after a dose or two of his fiction novels. His ventures with his maternal grandfather in their ancestral house in Aracataca as a young boy, and the matchless fates of its citizens become the epic of the Buendia family of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude; and the story of his parents’ impermissible affections grows to be the incredible tale of Floro and Fermina in Love in the Time of Cholera. "The history of their forbidden love was another of the wonders of my youth…but they became so impassioned in their accounts that… I could not distinguish life from poetry," reveals the author. It is this "torrent of oral tradition" that nurtured his work with its charmingly mythic qualities so as to captivate his readers’ wistfulness for times of yore, an age when gossipy whispers became the histories of faces and places.
Late last year, Gabo published a new work of fiction (which is still in translation), his first in a decade since Of Love and Other Demons. Called Memories of My Melancholy Whores, it revolves around a 90-year-old journalist who falls in love with a 14-year-old sleeping beauty in a brothel. The inexhaustible writer whips up a surprising "memoir," undoubtedly drawn from his boundless intellectual reservoir – in particular, his sojourns to Cartagena and Barranquilla as a budding pressman – when it was presumed that he was composing the second volume of his autobiography. With a title that certainly raises some unyielding eyebrows, the 78-year-old novelist, who has been seriously ill for some years, remarkably sustains a literary adroitness that makes you wonder with childlike fervor what this magician of the mundane has up his sleeve for indefatigable years to come. Well, like Halloween huddles, it surely would be worth the corn-chip-munching, teeth-chattering wait.