Last month, I landed on page 224 of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez, who authored a novel released posthumously this month, is the author I’m the most consistently in awe of, who demonstrates the most complete command over every aspect of their work of any fiction writer I’ve read. His prose is impeccable, plots equally meandering and gripping, structure just confounding enough to distract yet logical on a visceral, instinctive level. His fiction writing is the pinnacle of the genre, the manifestation of a master in control of every aspect of process and output.
Something wasn’t quite clicking, though, as I lurched my way through the first half of One Hundred Years, the story of Macondo, a precolonial town lodged in the middle of a South American jungle, and the long arc of the Buendía family embedded at its center. Unlike other works of García Márquez fiction, which broadly utilize at least somewhat conventional plot lines to keep the reader engaged (strange circumstances of a murder in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a will-they-won’t-they arc hanging over Love in the Time of Cholera), One Hundred Years’ opening half employs the author’s typically peculiar pace without giving a hint of a binding central question. Decades pass, and town and family are hounded by strange forms of magic; the ancient gypsy Melquíades haunts the family home after his clan brings the miracle of ice to the middle of the tropics; a disease spreading the symptom of total memory loss appears suddenly, devastating Macondo, before disappearing wordlessly; an incessant swarm of yellow butterflies looms over the doomed lover of a Buendía daughter. Creeping plot lines build to crescendos over dozens of meticulous pages only to be abandoned in single sentences. I settled into entire epochs of Macondo life, grew painstaikingly comfortable with García Márquez’s maze of characters (half of whom are named José) by scrupulously cross-referencing the family tree printed on an opening page with the present run of play, just to find the most compelling José of all abruptly banished to the other side of town amidst yet another decade-long fast-forward. I groped through the first half of the novel, unable to latch onto its distinct rhythms, all the while growing increasingly frustrated by García Márquez’s apparently boundless capacity to meander. Befuddled and bedraggled, I arrived at the book’s midpoint with trepidation. The storytelling was beautiful, the characters rich, setting vibrant, but had the author himself caught a case of the very amnesia afflicting the Buendías? What, exactly, was going on in this town with this family?
Then, on page 224—I have the exact spot earmarked—I found out. The plodding changes to Macondo, slow generational turnover, annual comings and goings of the gypsies, they all spun together, coalesced into coherence, in two paragraphs. The moment occurs as the narrator describes the swiftness with which two new technologies—the railroad and the telephone—sweep through Macondo:
On the other hand, when someone from the town had the opportunity to test the crude reality of the telephone installed in the railroad station, which was thought to be a rudimentary version of the phonograph because of its crank, even the most incredulous were upset…It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one know for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía under the chestnut tree with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight. Ever since the railroad had been officially inaugurated and had begun to arrive with regularity on Wednesdays at eleven o’clock and the primitive wooden station with a desk, a telephone, and a ticket window had been built, on the streets of Macondo men and women were seen who had adopted everyday and normal customs and manners but who really looked like people out of a circus (224).
Oh, I thought to myself upon reading that paragraph, except it didn’t go exactly like that, the oh which I’ve just approximated for the page played out as a chain of small, wordless chemical reactions which culminated in a rush to my head, and my world was suddenly opened because I felt for the first time whilst reading One Hundred Years that I understood what the author was getting at, could see not exactly where but with what purpose he was steering the ship, and the lock which I’d been hopelessly jamming a rusted key into for three weeks suddenly unlatched, releasing with it the silent exhilaration which accompanies the slow creaking of a long-sealed attic door scraping open for the first time in a century. Two paragraphs, less than a page, instantly reshaped the first half of the novel, transforming it from a slow and forgettable burn into the most eloquent, disciplined, and profound setup I’d ever read. Synapses fired, stories snapped into place, and suddenly I no longer regretted the slog of the novel’s first half, the time I’d devoted trying to crack it, I appreciated it, a wave of gratitude swept over me, I accepted the very change I realized the novel was dedicated to elucidating, closed my eyes, felt the fluorescent beams buried deep in my eyelids spiraling into the foreground, rooted into a centuries-old universe, a world which once existed merely in another’s mind but now it was colliding with mine. I opened my eyes and the picture was crisper than it had been before I closed them.
And then, accompanying the clarity, the bliss, I felt it poking out, jamming into my chest, from the same place I always do. The melancholy.
I read fiction, firstly, because I love reading fiction, have always loved reading fiction, because it is not impossible but very close to impossible, requires a really extraneous set of circumstances, to have a bad day when you’re in the middle of reading a good book. The best fiction is equal parts escapist and introspective. It features storytelling profound enough to transcend the reader’s immediate environment while simultaneously forcing one to examine themself honestly, often brutally so. No other medium is capable of portraying such a thorough examination of what is probably most accurately categorized as Inner Life, though that characterization feels trite in the shadow of what fiction actually does, which is illuminate the unquantifiable and otherwise-ignored moments in life that a) exist only in the mind of the individual, b) exist only from the distinct perspective of the individual, c) are almost entirely indescribable in the course of day-to-day human interaction due to their (often) profound strangeness and unsuitability for common conversation, d) generally go left totally unstated otherwise, and, e) stitch together to make up the majority of human lived experience. So there’s that. Fiction rules.
But there’s another layer to my fiction reading, one which has always, from the time I first climbed into the Magic Tree House with Jack and Annie or hopped into the jalopy with the Hardy Boys, lingered in the back of my mind like a little metal washer, resting slightly against the back of my skull, weighing just heavily enough to prevent me from slipping into pure bliss in the presence of a skilled author. That little weight is my personal desire to write fiction. And the best way to improve as a writer of fiction is to read a bunch of fiction. It is a complete necessity, the only way to learn, evolve, grow, as a writer. It’s also really fulfilling; I extract bonus enjoyment out of my reading in the extra effort I often take to understand process by diagramming out plots, listening to and reading generous writers and teachers expound upon their and others’ work. Most of the time, I consider this dynamic a great stroke of luck—participating in an activity I’d pursue anyway for leisure (reading) correlates directly to achieving the sort of work I want to produce (writing). Complete serendipity.
Then there are the other times, the ones when Gabriel García Márquez sends me to Pluto and back in the span of a single paragraph, has me writhing around on my couch, pacing the apartment in anticipation, five thousand miles and three hundred years from home but I’m there with him in the jungle, yellow butterflies floating around my face, the taste of damp earth in my mouth, searching for imaginary treasure, entrenched in a world I know cannot exist while simultaneously, the whole goddamned time, I can’t quite quit a thought that I know is counterproductive, I know is destructive, I know is useless, but all the same I can’t stop thinking it: I’ll never be able to do this. And I’ll of course continue reading not just for pure pleasure but to keep trying to crack some code, and I’ll make my story maps and I’ll read and listen and talk with brilliant writers who might reassure me, might even praise me, but I sense it’ll be up to me and me alone to figure out what, exactly, to do about Gabriel García Márquez. How to face up to the master, convince myself that he, whose work so transcends my capacity to unravel and interpret, and I occupied the same plane, breathed in the same air?
I hear my mother in my ear now, you know what your grandfather would say, then I hear my grandfather himself chime in from the other room. How many times can I say it, he says. NEVER compare yourself to them. I know, and I try, and I’ll keep trying, but I can’t help myself, and some part of me knows I’ll never be able to help myself, I could stop calling myself a writer tomorrow, never pen another word, and I’d still feel a little tug every time I sit down to read, and that tug will be the inability to release myself from the instinctual compulsion to measure myself against it all.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I don’t, for example, get home after my men’s league basketball games, sit down to watch Stephen Curry play the Lakers, and twist myself into tortured knots because I’ll never be able to knock down a one-legged stepback three over a seven-foot center like Steph can. That would be, to put it mildly, absurd, the entertainment of a different sort of fantasy, one in which I’m delusional enough to engage with the premise that I might, somehow, be capable of even briefly capturing the same magic as one of the greatest basketball players in the world, one so laughably athletically superior to me that I’m considering deleting the paragraph you’re reading now out of sheepishness. In theory, reading the sorts of authors I’m enjoying so much now, the masters who launch me into other stratospheres, take my breath away, have me clenching book covers with sweaty palms—García Márquez, Morrison, Nabokov—should fill me only with the same wonder, appreciation, and gratitude which builds in me when I watch Curry shoot a basketball. These writers are uniquely them, and I am uniquely me, and unlike the score in a basketball game this is all subjective, a matter of personal taste, and therefore the whole idea of the “master” is really quite stupid if you think about it, and I can appreciate greatness while doing my own thing, free of judgement, accept myself, trust myself and my work, without comparing myself like a fool to the incomparable. My cognitive mind understands this is a fool’s game.
And yet…
García Márquez’s introduction of the telephone in One Hundred Years was the second time he’s gotten me bad. Last spring, lying in a shaded hammock amidst the oppressive heat of Colombia’s Tatacoa desert—only a slight variation of the blood-congealing weather chronicled in One Hundred Years—I arrived at the end of chapter one of Love in the Time of Cholera. It was the first work of García Márquez fiction I’d read. By the end of the book’s first chapter—roughly its fortieth page—the author has spun a head-whipping tale of the final days of fictional twentieth-century socialite Dr. Juvenal Urbino, replete with intricate explanations of the false identity behind the dead body of the Doctor’s favorite chess companion, and intimate studies, down to a pages-long analysis of a years-old fight over a missing bar of soap, of the complex domesticity binding the doctor and his wife, Fermina Daza through their final stage of life. When an ill-fated attempt to capture a foul-mouthed parrot ends in the downfall of the Doctor, his 72-year-old widow is left alone in the opulent house the couple had devoted their lives to maintaining. García Márquez, in other words, kills off the book’s ostensible protagonist by the end of the book’s first chapter. The remainder of the novel, the reader is left to assume, is destined to play out as a retelling of Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s romance, an examination of the couple’s lifelong love—the eponymous love, surely, identified in the book’s title.
There is enough eloquence embedded in first chapter of Cholera to set up ten exquisite full-length novels. Yet it isn’t until the chapter’s final paragraph, a full forty pages into the book, when Márquez, in the fashion of a twisted yellow ribbon tied to a small, white card meticulously engraved with a message of the highest urgency fluttering through the wind, daintily dodging sharp branches strewn with sticky, jasmine-scented burrs, smacks its recipient in the forehead with the abrupt revelation that he has set up an entirely different sort of love story, one starring not Dr. Urbino, the star of the opening chapter, but a bit character who hardly makes a cameo until the section’s final page: Florentino Ariza, who lingers around after the Doctor’s funeral procession has cleared to personally deliver a declaration of love to the just-widowed Fermina Daza, a maneuver which utterly transforms the scope of the novel two sentences. Two sentences.
Thinking as she slept, she [Fermina Daza] thought that she would never again be able to sleep this way, and she began to sob in her sleep, and she slept, sobbing, without changing position on her side of the bed, until long after the roosters crowed and she was awakened by the despised sun of the morning without him. Only then did she realize that she had slept a long time without dying, sobbing in her sleep, and that while she slept, sobbing, she had thought more about Florentino Ariza than about her dead husband (37).
In the desert, I read these lines, the last of the book’s first chapter, and, when I’d realized what the author had just pulled off, slowly draped my maroon-covered Cholera copy over my chest, gripping the splayed pages in place at each breast. Just above the creased lines stretching across the skin of my right elbow, I noticed a section of my purple hammock, maybe two inches wide and one tall, where the threads had just begun to fray. I locked in on this patch. The threads intertwined very specifically, so that really what appeared to be a single thread consisted of lots of even tinier strings, and the further each string stretched the more the fabric’s illusion, of a constitution full of bulky, secure strings, was maintained. I rocked my elbow gently, watched as each piece of yarn delicately curled up with the release of pressure, expanded, left imperceptible, fuzzy, dirt-colored spaces between recently-impregnable criss-crosses of fabric. I crossed my eyes, lost focus. The rolling sea of thread focused again with laser clarity. A year earlier, I’d been sitting in a New York City apartment making oatmeal. The room was full of friends in loud conversation. I dumped a handful of apple slices into the pot of steaming oats, and as I did a single, finely chopped chunk tumbled to the floor. I reached to pick it up. Turned it over in my hand. Sat down on the stool next to me. Framed by the dark marble of the counter behind it, I studied the apple with a voracity I’d previously applied to very few subjects. A smooth, rectangular patch of thin skin, glistening meat made up of identical shapes I’d never before seen, cells-within-cells, dotted by fine bumps I had to squint to register. The noise of the room faded, my peripheral vision disappeared, I lost control of my fingers. I smell the pot start to burn.
In my hammock. I lift the book back up, read the lines again. Fold over a page corner, so I know where to return. Press myself up and out of my cocoon, backside first, legs swinging over the side. Walk to the edge of the property, marked by a stretch of oblong, basalt-colored stones, and look out. The landscape is flat, oppressively flat, devoid of color entirely but for the hour before and the hour after the sun sets, the only times when the land feels habitable. Now is not one of those times. A scalding wind lifts patches of dust indiscriminately from one remote point to another, splintered shards dangle limply in the wind, plunge, smack silently against the beige ground, smooth, steep rocks jut sharply towards the harsh midday sun, beating down upon it all, dispassionately sucking the moisture from the air, cracking exposed hands, burning uninitiated skin.
I’m peering into the dearth but I’m also back in that place, the one in which those dried-out sticks, shadowless slopes, and random kicks of dust shimmer with a hallowed glow, project as a sequence of boundless, endlessly overlapping riddles, mysteries which I both cannot understand and have already solved. I am both here and there, and all around me the distant heat of the desert simmers.
This is what he does. This is what it can do. This is what I could do.
I think of the master, his tightly spun web rocking with the wind back in the hammock, the words which have taken me here, the bleak landscape screaming at me with precious urgency.
I’m on the moon.
Mostly, that’s what I’m thinking. But somewhere else, a smooth, weighty wristwatch oozing rose gold, dripping over my guts, tugs at the top of my ribcage, compresses into my lungs, each tick tick tick jabs into the left side of my chest, screams with every stroke, the doubt, the distrust, and the words force me to confront the implacable question echoing through the desert, rolling through the cage, rattling my skull.
Will I ever take you there?