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I would like my books to be published posthumously.

I would like my books to be published posthumously.
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (1927–2014)

Gabriel García Márquez, interview for Paris Review (winter, 1981)
Interviewed by: Peter Stone
Translated from English: Granit Zela

How do you feel about us using a tape recorder for the interview?

The problem is that the moment you know that the interview is being recorded, your behavior changes. In my case, I immediately become defensive. As a journalist, I think we haven't yet learned how to use a tape recorder to conduct an interview. I think the best way is to have a long conversation without taking any notes. Then, the journalist should remember the conversation and write it down as an impression of what he felt, not necessarily using the exact words that were said. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them somewhat faithfully to the person being interviewed. The thing that worries you about recording everything is that you are not being faithful to the person being interviewed, because you are recording them even when they are talking nonsense. That is why when there is a tape recorder I am aware that I am being interviewed, when there is no tape recorder I speak unconsciously and completely naturally.


Since we started talking about journalism, how does it feel to be a journalist again, after writing novels for so long? Do you do it with a different feeling or see it with different eyes?

I have always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I did not like before in journalism were the working conditions. In addition, my thoughts and ideas had to be conditioned by the interests of the newspaper. Now, after working as a novelist and achieving financial independence as a novelist, I can choose the topics that interest me and that coincide in any case with my ideas. I always really enjoy taking the opportunity to write a great journalistic piece.

Do journalists and novelists have different responsibilities for finding the balance between truth and imagination?

In journalism, a single fact that is fictional can prejudice the entire work. Quite the opposite, in literature, a single fact that is true can give legitimacy to the entire work. That is the only difference, and it has to do with the writer's commitment. A novelist can do anything he wants as long as he can make people believe it.

How did you start writing?

Drawing. Drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write, I used to draw comics at school and at home. It's funny now that I realize that when I was in high school, I was considered a writer even though, in fact, I had never written anything. If a pamphlet, letter, or petition needed to be written, I was the one who would do it because I was thought to be the writer. When I got to college, I had a very good literary background in general, well above the average of my friends. At university in Bogotá, I started making new friends who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night, a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and started reading it. Metamorphosis. I was so surprised after reading the first line that I almost fell out of bed. The first line is: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning after troubled dreams, he noticed in his bed that he had been transformed into a monstrous monster.” When I read the line, I thought to myself that I didn’t know you were allowed to write such things, if I had known, I would have started writing long ago. So I wrote stories right away. They are completely intellectual stories, because I wrote them based on my literary experience and I had not yet found the connection between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaper The Spectator in Bogotá and had some success at the time – perhaps because no one in Colombia was writing intellectual stories. What was being written then was mostly about rural life and social life. When I wrote my first stories, I was told they had Joycean influences.

Had you read Joyce at that time?

I had never read Joyce, so I started reading it. Ulysses. I read the only Spanish edition that existed. Since then, after reading Ulysses in English as well as a very good translation in French, I could understand that the original Spanish translation was very poor, but I learned something that would be very useful to me in the future by learning the technique of interior monologue. Later I found it in Virginia Woolf and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although later I realized that the person who invented this type of interior monologue was the anonymous writer of Lazarillo de tormes.

Can you tell us about some of your early literary influences?

The people who helped me get rid of my intellectual attitude towards the story were the American writers of the Lost Generation. I realized that their literature had a relationship to life that my stories did not. And then an event happened that was very important in relation to this attitude. It happened in Bogotazo, on April 9, 1948, when a political leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was shot and the people of Bogotá took to the streets. I was in a retirement home about to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitán had just gotten into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On the way to the retirement home, I saw people who were already out in the streets and demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening I became aware of the kind of place I was living in and how little my stories had to do with it. When I was later forced to return to Barranquilla in the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood, I realized that this was the kind of life I had lived, the life I knew and wanted to write about.

Around 1950-5, another event occurred that influenced my literary inclinations. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I had been born, and to sell the house where I had spent the first years of my life. When I arrived, it was quite a shock at first, because I was now twenty-two years old and had not been there since I was eight. Nothing had changed, but I felt that I was not really looking at the village, but experiencing it as if I were reading it. It seemed to me that everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was sit down and copy what was there and what I was reading. For practical purposes, everything had become literature, the houses, the people, and the memories. I am not sure whether I had already read William Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner's allowed me to write what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the countryside were much the same as what Faulkner had experienced. It was a banana plantation region inhabited by many American fruit company workers who gave it the same atmosphere that I had found in American writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of Faulkner's literary influence, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that I needed to address in the same way that Faulkner had addressed similar material. After that trip to the countryside I returned to writing Leaf storm, my first novel. What really happened to me on that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had happened in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now understanding. From the moment I wrote Leaf storm I wanted to be a writer, no one could stop me, and the only thing left for me to do was to become the best writer in the world. This happened in 1953, but it was not until 1967 that I received my first financial rewards after writing five of my eight books.

Do you think it's common for young writers to deny the value of their childhood and experiences and become intellectualized like you did in the beginning?

No, the process usually happens the other way around, but if I had to give a young writer some advice, I would tell them to write about something that has happened to them, it's always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to them or something they have read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says, "God help me not to invent when I sing." I'm always amused by the idea that the greatest praise for my work is for imagination, when the truth is that there is not a single line in all my work that is not based on reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Who were you writing for then? Who was reading you?

Leaf storm was written for friends who helped me, lent me books and were very enthusiastic about my work. In general, I think it is usually written for someone. When I write, I am always aware that this friend will like this, or that another friend will like that paragraph or chapter, I always think of specific people. In the end, all books are written for friends. The problem behind writing One hundred years of solitude It was that now I don't know who I'm writing for among those millions of readers, and that bothers me and frustrates me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they're thinking.

How would you describe the process of searching for a style that you went through after writing 'A Storm in the Leaves' and before you were able to write 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'?

After I wrote Leaf storm I decided to write about the countryside and childhood as a way of escaping from having to face and write about the political reality of the country. I had the false impression that I was hiding behind this kind of nostalgia instead of facing the political things that were happening. This was a time when there was a lot of discussion about the relationship between literature and politics. I continued to try to close the gap between the two. My influence had been Faulkner; now it was Hemingway. I wrote There is no one to write to the Colonel., The evil hour and The funeral of the great-grandmother, which were all written more or less at the same time and have many things in common. These stories have events that take place in a different village than the one in which they take place. Leaf storm and One hundred years of solitude. It's a village in which there is no magic. It's non-fiction. But when I finished The evil hour I realized that all my views were wrong again. I realized that, in fact, the writings about childhood were more political and had more to do with the reality of my country than I had thought. After At the wrong hour I didn't write anything for five years. I always had an idea of ​​what I wanted to do, but something was missing and I wasn't sure what, until one day I discovered the right tone - the tone I eventually used in One hundred years of solitude. It was based on the way my grandmother told her stories. She told things that seemed supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. When I finally discovered the tone I needed to use, I sat down and worked every day for eighteen months.

How did she express the "fantastic" so naturally?

The most important thing was the expression on her face. She didn't change her expression when she told her stories, and everyone was amazed. In previous attempts to write One hundred years of solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe the stories myself and write it with the same expression my grandmother used to tell them: with a straight face.

There seems to be a journalistic quality to that technique or tone. You describe seemingly fantastic events with such minute detail that it makes them seem real. Is this something you picked up from journalism?

This is a journalistic trick that you can use in literature as well. For example, if you say there are elephants flying in the sky, people won't believe you. But if you say there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you. One hundred years of solitude is full of things like that. This is exactly the technique my grandmother used, I remember especially the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very little, an electrician came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a bell with which he would go down from the electric poles. My grandmother said that every time this man hit the ground with a stick, he could fill the house with butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn't say that the butterflies were yellow, people wouldn't believe it. When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it believable. One day I went out into the garden and I saw a woman coming into the house to wash and she was taking out the sheets to dry, it was very smelly. She was talking to the wind so that it wouldn't throw the sheets on the ground. I found that if I used the Remedios Beauty sheets, it would stick there. So I did, to make it believable. The problem for any writer is believability. Anyone can write about anything as long as it's believable.

What was the origin of the plague of insomnia in "One Hundred Years of Solitude"?

Starting with Oedipus, I've always been interested in the plague. I've studied a lot about the plague of the Middle Ages. One of my favorite books is Diary of the Year of the Plague by Daniel Defoe. He is like a journalist and what he says seems like pure fantasy. For many years I thought Defoe had written about the plague of London as he saw it, but then I discovered that it was a novel, because Defoe was less than seven years old when the plague broke out in London. The plague has always been one of my recurring themes and in various forms. For many years I thought that the political violence in Colombia had the same metaphysics as the plague. Before One hundred years of solitude I had used a plague to kill all the birds in a story titled The day after Saturday IN One hundred years of solitude, I used the plague of insomnia as a literary trick, since it is the opposite of the plague of sleep. After all, literature is nothing more than carpentry.

Can you explain this analogy a little more?

Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material that has to be as strong as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically, there is very little magic involved and a lot of hard work. And like Proust, I think it is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. I have never done carpentry, but it is the work that I admire the most, especially because you can never get someone else to do something for you, the way you want it.

Are the characters in "The Autumn of the Patriarch," dictators, for example, Modeled after real people? There seem to be similarities to Franco, Perón, and Trujillo.

In every novel, the character is a collage of different characters that you know, have heard of, or have read about. I read everything I could find about the Latin American dictators of the last century and the beginning of this century. I also talked to a lot of people who had lived under dictatorships. I did this for at least ten years. And when I had a clear idea of ​​what the character would be like, I tried to forget everything I had read and heard, so that I could invent it, without using any situation that had happened in real life. For a moment I realized that I had never lived for any period of time under a dictatorship, so I thought that if I wrote the book in Spain, I could see what the atmosphere was like living in a dictatorship. But I realized that the atmosphere was very different in Spain under Franco than in a Caribbean dictatorship. So the book was kind of stuck for about a year. Something was missing, and I wasn't sure what it was. Then overnight I decided that the best thing to do was to go back to the Caribbean. So we all went back to Barranquilla, Colombia. I made a statement to the reporters that they thought was a joke. I said I was going back because I had forgotten what guava smelled like. In fact, it was what I needed to finish my book. I took a trip around the Caribbean. As I went from island to island, I found the elements that my novel had been missing.

You often use the theme of the loneliness of power.

The more power you have, the harder it is to figure out who is lying to you and who is not. When there is absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and this is the worst kind of loneliness. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose ultimate goal is to isolate him from reality; everything works in harmony to isolate him.

What about the writer's loneliness? Is it different?

It has a lot to do with the loneliness of power. Many writers' attempts to portray reality often lead to a distorted view of it. In trying to displace reality, one can end up losing touch with it, in an ivory tower, as they say, journalism is a very good guard against that. That's why I've always tried to continue doing journalism, because it keeps me in touch with the real word, especially with political journalism and politics. The loneliness that threatened me after One hundred years of solitude It wasn't the loneliness of the writer, it was the loneliness of fame, which is much more like the loneliness of power. My friends protected me from it. They are always there.

How does the writing process begin? One of the recurring images in “Autumn” "of the patriarch" are the cows in the palace. Was this one of the original images?

I have a photography book that I'm going to show you. I've said on various occasions that at the beginning of all my books is always an image. The first image of Autumn of the patriarch there was a very old man in a very luxurious palace, where cows come in and eat the curtains. But that image didn't materialize until I saw the photograph. In Rome I went into a bookstore where I started looking at albums, which I like to collect. I saw this photo, it was just perfect. I immediately understood what the scene would be like. Since I'm not a great intellectual, I can find the beginnings of events in everyday things, in life and not in great masterpieces.

Do your novels ever take unexpected turns?

This used to happen to me in the beginning. In the first stories I had a general idea of ​​the mood, but I let myself be taken by surprise. The best advice I was given early on was that it was okay to work that way when I was young, because I had a stream of inspiration. But I was told that if I didn't learn the technique, I would be in trouble later when the inspiration was gone and technique was needed to compensate. If I hadn't learned this early on, I wouldn't be able to outline the structure of a book in advance now. Structure is a purely technical problem, and if you don't learn it early on, you never will.

So discipline is very important to you?

I don't think you can write a book that's worth anything without extraordinary discipline.

What about artificial stimulants?

One thing that Hemingway wrote that really impressed me was that writing for him was like boxing. He took care of his health and well-being. Faulkner had a reputation for being a drunkard, but in every interview he gave he said that it was impossible for him to write a single line when he was drunk. Hemingway said this too. Weak readers have asked me if I took drugs when I wrote some of my works. But this shows that they know nothing about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely sober at every moment of writing and in good health. I am very much against the romantic concept of writing, according to which the act of writing is a sacrifice and that the worse the conditions or emotional state, the better the writing comes out. I think you have to be in very good emotional and physical condition. Literary creation for me requires good health and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.

Blaise Cendrars has said that writing is a privilege compared to most other jobs and that writers exaggerate their suffering. What do you think?

I think writing is very difficult, like any carefully done job. However, it is a privilege to do a job for your own pleasure. I say that I am very demanding of myself and others, because I cannot stand mistakes. I think it is a privilege to do something with a degree of perfection. However, it is true that writers are often megalomaniacs and see themselves as the center of the universe and the conscience of society. But what I admire most is something well done. I am always very happy when I travel and realize that pilots are better pilots than I am as a writer.

When is the best time to write now? Do you have a work schedule?

When I became a professional writer, the biggest problem I had was my writing schedule. Being a journalist meant working nights. When I started writing full-time, I was forty, and my writing basically ran from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon when my boys got home from school. Since I was used to hard work, I felt guilty about only working in the morning, so I tried to work in the afternoons, but I found that what I wrote in the afternoon had to be rewritten the next morning, so I decided to work from nine to two-thirty and do nothing else. In the afternoons I have meetings and interviews and other unimportant things. I can only work in familiar settings and when I'm inside what I'm writing. I can't write in hotels, or on borrowed typewriters. It creates problems for me because when I travel I can't work. Of course, you always try to find an excuse to work less. That's why the conditions you set for yourself are always the hardest. You hope for inspiration regardless of the circumstances, a word that the Romantics used a lot. I'm convinced that there's a special state of mind in which you can write and things just flow. Then all the pretexts about how you can only write at home disappear. That moment and that state of mind seem to come when you've found the right subject and the right ways to approach it. And it has to be something you really enjoy, because there's nothing worse than doing something you don't enjoy. One of the hardest things is the first paragraph. I've spent months on the first paragraph, and once I have it, the rest comes very easily. In the first paragraph, I pick out most of the problems with your book. The theme, the style, the tone are established. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of example of what the rest of the book will be. This is why writing a storybook is much harder than writing a novel. Every time you write a story, you have to start over.

Do you think critics rate you very well?

Critics are to me the greatest example of what intellectualism is. First of all, they have a theory of what a writer should be. They try to make the writer fit their model and, if he doesn't fit, they try to force him into that model again. I'm only answering this because you asked me. I really don't care what critics think of me; I haven't even read literary criticism for many years. They have taken it upon themselves to be the intermediary between the author and the reader. I've always tried to be a very clear and precise writer, trying to get straight to the reader without having to go through criticism.

Do you think fame or success that comes too early in a writer's career is harmful?

It's harmful at any age. I would have liked my books to be published posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where you become a kind of commodity.

Why do you think fame is so destructive to a writer?

Mainly because it interferes with your private life. It takes away from the time you spend with friends and the time you could be working. It tends to isolate you from the real world. A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to constantly protect himself from fame. I hate to say this because it never seems honest, but I wish my books had been published after my death so I wouldn't have to deal with this job of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage of fame is that I've been able to put it to political use. Otherwise, it's very unpleasant. The problem is that you're famous twenty-four hours a day and you can't say, "Okay, I won't be famous until tomorrow," or press a button and say, "I won't be famous here or now."

Did you predict the extraordinary success of "One Hundred Years of Solitude"?

I knew it would be a book that would please my friends more than the others. But when the Spanish publisher told me that he would print eight thousand copies, I was surprised, because my other books had never sold more than seven hundred copies. I asked him why he didn't start more slowly, but he said that he was convinced that it was a good book and that all eight thousand copies would be sold between May and December. In fact, they were all sold out within a week in Buenos Aires.

Why do you think “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was so successful?

I have no idea, because I am a very bad critic of my own works. One of the most frequent explanations I have heard is that it is a book about the private lives of Latin American people, a book that was written by someone from the country. This explanation surprises me because in my first attempt to write it, the title of the book was HomeI wanted all the events of the novel to take place inside the house and everything outside would only be its impact on the house, I later abandoned the title Home, but once the book reaches the town of Macondo, it never goes any further. Another explanation I've heard is that every reader can do whatever they want with the characters in the book and make them their own. I don't want it to be made into a movie, because the moviegoer sees a face they might not have imagined.

Do you have any long-term ambitions or regrets as a writer?

I think my answer is the same as the one I gave you about fame. I was asked one day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but you know that for me it would be an absolute disaster. Of course I would be interested in deserving it, but it would be terrible to receive it. It would just complicate the problems of fame even more. The only thing I regret most in life is not having a daughter. /Academy Magazine/

Translator's note: Marques wins Nobel Prize for Literature just a year later, in 1982, with the motivation: “For novels and stories in which the fantastic and the real are combined in a rich imaginary world, reflecting the life and conflicts of a continent.” The novel left in manuscript “See you in August” was published posthumously, also in Albanian, on March 6, 2024, on the author’s ninety-seventh birthday.