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Gabriel García Márquez in His Own Words on Writing 100 Years of Solitude
One of the greatest novelists and writers of the 20th century has died. Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez passed away Thursday in Mexico at the age of 87. It has been reported that only the Bible has sold more copies in the Spanish language than the works of García Márquez, who was affectionately known at "Gabo" throughout Latin America. His book "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is considered one of the masterful examples of the literary genre known as magic realism, and it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The Swedish Academy described it as a book "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts." We air clips of him speaking in his own words about writing his acclaimed book.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the greatest novelists and writers of the 20th century has died. Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, passed away Thursday in Mexico at the age of 87. Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, has declared three days of mourning.
PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: [translated] As a government, and in homage to the memory of Gabriel García Márquez, I have declared a state of national mourning for three days, and I have ordered all public institutions to fly the national flag at half-mast. And we also hope Colombians will do the same in their homes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today we’ll spend the hour discussing Gabriel García Márquez’s life and work, which have sold tens of millions of copies, and we’ll feature clips of the writer himself. It’s been reported that only the Bible has sold more copies in the Spanish language than the works of García Márquez, who was affectionately known at "Gabo" throughout Latin America. Among his best-known books, in addition to One Hundred Years of Solitude, are Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Autumn of the Patriarch, The General in His Labyrinth.
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. In the 1950s, he began working as a journalist in the capital city of Bogotá. He wrote a series of articles about a Colombian sailor that drew the ire of the conservative government, so he left to report from Europe, where he began writing fiction. He eventually returned to Colombia and in 1967 published what would become his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It weaves together the misfortunes of a family over seven generations and is based in a town called Macondo, which many take to represent the town where García Márquez was born and raised by his grandparents until he was nine years old. The book is considered one of the masterful examples of the literary genre known as magical realism, and it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The Swedish Academy described it as a book, quote, "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts." This is an excerpt from García Márquez accepting the Nobel award.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway. I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Gabriel García Márquez speaking in 1982 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of his biographers, Gerald Martin, described One Hundred Years of Solitude as, quote, "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure."
García Márquez’s writing was shaped by his political outlook, which was informed in part by a 1928 military massacre of banana workers striking against United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was an early ally of Fidel Castro in Cuba and a critic of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile. For decades, he was denied a visa to travel to the U.S. until President Bill Clinton lifted the ban in 1995.
In 1998, when he was in his seventies, García Márquez used the money from his Nobel award to buy a controlling interest in the Colombian news magazine Cambio. He told reporters at the time, quote, "My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality."
Soon we’ll be joined by Chilean novelist Isabel Allende to discuss García Márquez’s life. But first, this is part of a speech García Márquez gave after he sold his one millionth copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] When I was 38 years old and with four books published since I was 20, I sat down at the typewriter and began: "Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." I had no idea of the meaning nor the origin of that phrase or where it was leading me. What I know today is that I did not stop writing for a single day for 18 straight months, until I finished the book.
It seems incredible, but one of my most pressing problems was finding paper for the typewriter. I had the bad manners of believing that misspelled words, language mistakes or errors in grammar were actually created. And whenever detected, I would tear up the page and throw it into the trash basket to start again. With the pace I had gained in a year of practice, I figured it would take me about six months working every morning to complete the book.
Esperanza Araiza, the unforgettable Pera, was a typist for poets and filmmakers who completed the final versions of the great works of Mexican writers, including Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes; Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo; and several original scripts of Luis Buñuel. When I asked her to finish the final version, the novel was a draft of riddled patches, first in black ink and then in red to avoid confusion. But that was not unusual for a woman used to being in a den full of wolves.
A few years later, Pera confessed to me that when she was going home with the final version of the manuscript that I had corrected, she got off the bus, slipped and fell under a torrential rain. The pages went floating in the mire of the streets. With the help of other passengers, she was able to
collect the drenched and near-illegible pages and took them home to dry page by page with a clothes iron.
What could be the topic of an even better book would have been how we survived—Mercedes and I with our two children—during that time when I did not gain a dime anywhere. I don’t even know how Mercedes managed during those months to not miss a single day’s food in the house. We resisted the temptation to take out loans with interest, until we got the courage in our hearts and we started our first forays to Mount Mercy [Monte de Piedad] pawn shop. After the fleeting relief of having pawned certain small things, we had to pawn the jewels that Mercedes had received from family members over time. The expert examined them with the rigor of a surgeon. He checked with his magical eye the diamonds of the earrings, emeralds of the necklace, rubies of the rings, and in the end he returned them after a long pause. "All this is pure glass."
In the times of greatest difficulty, Mercedes did her astral accounting and told her patient landlord without the slightest tremor in her voice, "We can pay you all together in six months."
"Excuse me ma’am," replied the owner, "do you realize that this will be a huge sum?"
"I do realize this," Mercedes said impassively, "but then we’ll have it all figured out, rest assured."
The good man, who was a senior official of the state and one of the most elegant and patient men that we ever met, did not tremble his voice either and responded, "Very well, ma’am, your word is all I need." And he calculated his mortal accounts and said, "I await you on September 7th."
Finally, at the beginning of August 1966, Mercedes and I went to the post office of Mexico City to send to Buenos Aires the final version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a package of 590 typewritten pages, double-spaced on ordinary paper and addressed to Francisco Porrúa, literary director of the South American publisher. The postal employee put the package on the scale, made his mental calculations and said, "It will cost 82 pesos." Mercedes counted the bills and loose change she had left in her purse and faced reality: "We only have 53."
We opened the package. We divided it into two equal parts and sent one part to Buenos Aires, without even asking how we were going to get the money to send the rest. Only later did we realize that we had not sent the first part, but the last. But before we got the money to send it, Paco Porrúa, our man in the South American publisher, eager to read the first half of the book, sent us the money we needed to send the first part. That was how we came to be born in our lives today.
AMY GOODMAN: Gabriel García Márquez. He passed away at the age of 87 yesterday. We’re dedicating today’s show to remembering the man considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. When we come back, we’ll discuss his life and his work, with Isabel Allende, the best-selling Chilean writer and one of Latin America’s most renowned and revered novelists. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a moment.
"He Gave Us Back Our History": Isabel Allende on Gabriel García Márquez in Exclusive Interview
In an exclusive interview, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende remembers the life and legacy of late writer Gabriel García Márquez. She reads from his landmark novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and talks about how García Márquez influenced generations of thinkers and writers in Latin America and across the world. "He’s the master of masters," Allende says. "In a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world, and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror." Allende describes the first time she read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and how it impacted her. "It was as if someone was telling me my own story," she says. We also air video of García Márquez in his own words and hear Democracy Now! co-host Juan González read from "The General in His Labyrinth."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today, we remember the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. He died Thursday at the age of 87. He’s widely regarded as one of the century’s greatest writers. His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, sold more than 50 million copies in 25 languages.
To talk more about Gabriel García Márquez, we’re joined by Isabel Allende, the best-selling Chilean writer and one of Latin America’s most renowned novelists. She’s the author of some 20 books, including Maya’s Notebook, The House of the Spirits, Paula, Daughter of Fortune. Her latest book is called Ripper. Allende now lives in California, but she was born in Peru in 1942 and traveled the world as the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. Her father’s first cousin was Salvador Allende, Chile’s president between 1970 and 1973. When Augusto Pinochet seized power in a CIA-backed military coup in ’73, Isabel Allende fled from her native Chile to Venezuela.
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Isabel Allende, and it is an honor to have you with us for this hour to discuss the person who has so shaped literature, not only in Latin America—
ISABEL ALLENDE: In the world.
AMY GOODMAN: —but has had enormous influence all over the world. Talk about Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel.
ISABEL ALLENDE: It’s hard to talk about him. It’s very emotional. He’s the master of masters. The boom of Latin American literature that took the world by assault in the second half of the century, began in 1963 with a novel by an unknown writer called Mario Vargas Llosa. And that’s the moment when the world noticed that we had great writers. And there were—it was a choir of many voices. But the most important voice, the voice that really was the pillar of this movement, was García Márquez with One Hundred Years of Solitude. And every novel that he wrote afterward was not only acclaimed by the critics and translated, and he had innumerable awards, but they were popular novels. It was like reading Dickens or Balzac. People in the streets read García Márquez. Every book he wrote had popular acclaim. So, in a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror, in a way.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, amazingly, in his own country, he was—he was virtually—for a literary figure, it’s unusual—he was like a rock star. Everything that García Márquez said or did, the country followed and talked about and—
ISABEL ALLENDE: In the world.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes.
ISABEL ALLENDE: But, you know, in Latin America, that is not a rare event. In Latin America, some writers, because they were writers, have been elected president. Writers are consulted as if they were prophets or astrologers. They are supposed to know everything. And in a way, it makes sense, because in such a complicated and weird continent as Latin America is, somehow writers summarize our reality, the collective dreams, the collective hopes, the fears. They give us back our history, which is usually magical and horrible.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you remember when you first read One Hundred Years of Solitude?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Yeah. The novel was published in 1967, and I read it a year later. I had given birth to my son, Nicolás, who was born in 1966, and I had gone back to work. I was working in a women’s magazine. And I remember when I read the book, I didn’t go to work. I just sat there with the book until I finished it. It was as if someone was telling me my own story. It was my family, my country, my—the people I knew. To me, there was nothing magical about it. It was my grandmother. I also grew up in the house of my grandparents, as he did.
The story that we just heard about his manuscript, of sending it in two batches because he couldn’t afford, the same happened with The House of the Spirits many years later. I was living in Venezuela, didn’t have money to send the whole manuscript, and it went in two batches. So, there were so many similarities. We have the same agent, Carmen Balcells, who many—often she will say to me that I had reactions like him. For example, we would receive a contract. We never read the contracts; we just signed them. And suddenly, for no reason in particular, we would read it and say, "No, this one I’m not going to sign." So, you know that kind of—
AMY GOODMAN: She was in Spain?
ISABEL ALLENDE: She was in Spain. That kind of struggle where you feel totally identified with his words, with his work, with his personality. He was a difficult man, but he was so creative, so quick in response. He was an amazing man.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what was it about One Hundred Years of Solitude that made it such a—such a powerful book, not just in Latin America, but throughout the world? I mean, here is this—basically the story of several generations of a family in a forgotten part of Colombia, a small little town—
ISABEL ALLENDE: An invented—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —isolated from the world.
ISABEL ALLENDE: An invented place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Invented, right. But—and what was it about that book that made it such an important and seminal work?
ISABEL ALLENDE: I think that what happened with magic realism and why people all over the world connected to it is because the world and life are very mysterious. We don’t control anything. We have no explanations for everything. And we try to live in a controlled world, because we feel safe. And in this book, and the books that followed, there was this explosion of the unbelievable, which is around us all the time. And it’s an acceptance that we don’t control anything, there are no explanations, that there is something—there are spirits. There are coincidences, prophetic dreams, things that happen that are magical because we cannot explain them. I suppose that centuries ago any phenomenon like electricity would be considered magical. Maybe in 200 years of solitude we will be able to explain what is now magical to us.
AMY GOODMAN: In this clip from the 1998 documentary, Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, García Márquez talks about the role women played in his life when he was a young boy.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] We were the only two men in a house full of women. My life was a strange one, because the women, who were ruled over by my grandmother, were living in a supernatural world, a fantastic world where everything was possible. The most unbelievable things were part of everyday life. I got used to this way of thinking. But my grandfather was the most down to realistic man I have ever known. He would tell me about the civil war and all the political tricks. He spoke to me as if I was an adult. So I was split between two worlds—the world of my grandfather, whom I spent my days with as he dedicated a lot of his time to me, and the world of the women, in parallel with my grandfather’s, but with which I stayed alone at night.
AMY GOODMAN: Gabriel García Márquez elaborated on the influence his grandmother had on him as a child and developing writer. This is a clip of an interview he did with the Spanish broadcaster RTVE.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] My grandmother was like my mother to me. She was a person who was quite superstitious. I always had the impression she had a secret link to certain supernatural powers, because in my infancy it was always a marvel to see how she always had a way of knowing things and foreseeing things and having prophecies that would be fulfilled. She was a nervous type, and she died at a very old age, and quite delirious, of course. But the other thing I remember well is that she spoke a type of Spanish that was extraordinary, full of archaisms, spellbinding images. This has been a launching point for me as a writer. I have now researched all her terminology, all her refrains, her words. Now I know them all consciously, but I grew up with those words and those terms with that construction, as if it was the natural speech of the people, because it was what she used in her speech. With that language, I wrote my books.
AMY GOODMAN: Gabriel García Márquez, speaking to the Spanish broadcaster RTVE. Our guest for the hour is Isabel Allende, in this exclusive, extended interview with her responding to Gabriel García Márquez’s death. Magic realism, how was that phrase coined? And the influence it’s had on, well, you as a writer and people all over the world?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Well, I understand that it—first of all, García Márquez did not invent it. He was the great—the one who was able to put it together in such a fantastic way that it was accepted all over. But it began long before. I would say that magic realism begins with the conquistadors that came to Latin America, and they were writing these letters to the king or to Spain in which they talk about a continent that had fountains of youth, that you could pick up the gold and the diamonds from the floor, that people had unicorns or had one foot so big that at siesta time they would raise it like a parasol to have shade. I mean, this is—I’m not making this up. This is in the conquistadors’ letters. So, in that magical beginning of Latin America and Spain together, this reality was created. And a great Cuban writer was the one who first put the term together, and then García Márquez popularized it. But it was—it is said that it began in Germany, that the first person who ever put together magic and realism was in Germany.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you read the words of Gabriel García Márquez, those words that you read when you were staying home from work because you couldn’t put the book down?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Do you want me to read them in Spanish or in English?
AMY GOODMAN: In both. In both.
ISABEL ALLENDE: In both? Let me start with Spanish, because in Spanish this sounds so much better. This is the beginning of Cien años de soledad.
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de veinte casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarías con
el dedo."
Now, in English.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Isabel Allende reading from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Isabel, one of the—obviously, one of the big influences on his life was not only his own family upbringing, but the political climate in which he grew up, from the time of the infamous La Violencia in Colombia, where over 300,000 people were killed in a civil war, to, later on, the drug wars in Colombia, the enormous dislocation of Colombian society. Talk about his political views and development and how he showed them through his literature.
ISABEL ALLENDE: He was always a leftist. And he became friends with Fidel Castro very early on during the Cuban revolution. He was adored in Cuba, and he lived there and visited Cuba many times. He formed the film institute in Havana. And his views, his leftist views, brought him a lot of trouble in Colombia. He couldn’t live in Colombia for a while because his life was threatened. He lived in Mexico. He lived in many other places. And he died in Mexico, actually. So, he’s not the only one, because many of our writers of that time lived in exile and wrote in exile, in Europe and in other places, because it was unsafe to live in their own countries. It happened also in Chile. A wave of Chilean writers left after the military coup, and they wrote in exile.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to this clip from the documentary, again, Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, where he talks about his time in Paris, as we talk about the exile—it was the ’50s, he had fled Colombia—and how many of his fellow writers from Latin America, who were also in Paris, faced dictators at home.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] What had been important for me, in Paris, was the perspective I acquired on Latin America, because in Latin America I was just a Colombian, a Caribbean, and I deeply am a Caribbean, but in Paris I became a Caribbean aware of his culture and of the more general culture the Caribbean culture fits itself into. In the cafés, I regularly met Argentinians, people from Central America, Mexicans, Caribbeans from different countries.
It was at the time of the dictators. There was Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, Odría in Peru, Trujillo in Santo Domingo. There was Perón in Argentina. There were dictators nearly everywhere. There was Batista in Cuba.
I was living in a pension in Cujas Street, right in the Latin Quarter. The poet Nicolás Guillén was living in a pension opposite mine. Our visits to him were like a pilgrimage. Each of us expected news from his country. One early morning, as he woke up as early as he used to in Cuba, he leaned out of his window and shouted, "He has fallen!" Everyone believed it was the dictator of his own country.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, a 1998 documentary, speaking about his time in Paris in exile in the ’50s. Isabel Allende, you were just describing this and also talking about what influenced him: your own country, your cousin, the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, taken down by Pinochet, died in the palace on another September 11, September 11, 1973.
ISABEL ALLENDE: Yeah, and García Márquez wrote about that. He was very active against the dictatorship. At the time, Chile was like the most visible military coup and dictatorship in the world. The world paid a lot of attention to Chile. But there were dictators all over Latin America. There were—very soon, the dirty war started in Argentina. And then in Uruguay, the situation in Uruguay was awful. Brazil, in many places, there was nowhere to go. There were masses of people running away from their own countries and trying to find refuge in another place, and then there would be a dictatorship in the other place. That happened to many Chileans that went to Argentina and died in Argentina. So García Márquez, who was aware of all this and had already lived it in his youth in his own country, and he was in Paris because he was running away from repressive governments, wrote about that. And in his book The Autumn of the Patriarch, he—in a great metaphor of all of Latin America, he summarizes the horror of autocratic governments and ignorance and abuse, exploitation, killings. I think that that book represents all those dictatorships.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with Isabel Allende, the great Chilean writer, one of Latin America’s most renowned novelists, speaking about the death of a giant of the 20th century. Gabriel García Márquez died in his home in Mexico, outside of his country, Colombia, at the age of 87 on Thursday. We’ll continue with this discussion in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we remember the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. He died Thursday at the age of 87 at his home in Mexico. He is widely regarded as one of the century’s greatest writers. Our guest here in the studio is Isabel Allende, the best-selling Chilean writer, one of Latin America’s most renowned novelists, as she joins us for this exclusive interview in our studios here in New York. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to remark, as Isabel has said that the—that García Márquez is still with us in his writings. And all of us who have read his books over the years have our own favorite passages and haunting passages that stay with us for years. I wanted to read one from The General in His Labyrinth.
ISABEL ALLENDE: That’s about Simón Bolívar.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right, the story of the great liberator Simón Bolívar in his last days. And the amazing thing, is here you have Bolívar, a figure who’s known throughout Latin America, revered throughout Latin America, spent his life in wars of liberation, and in his final days, Márquez has a passage where he talks about Bolívar’s disposition to literature and where he had his secretaries reading books to him. And here, Bolívar is dying, and Márquez writes:
“It was the last book he read in its entirety. He had been a reader of imperturbable voracity during the respites after battles and the rests after love, but a reader without order or method. He read at any hour, in whatever light was available, sometimes strolling under the trees, sometimes on horseback under the equatorial sun, sometimes in dim coaches rattling over cobbled pavements, sometimes swaying in the hammock as he dictated a letter. A bookseller in Lima had been surprised at the abundance and variety of works he selected from a general catalogue that listed everything from Greek philosophers to a treatise on chiromancy. In his youth he read the Romantics under the influence of his tutor, Simón Rodríguez, and he continued to devour them as if he were reading himself and his own idealistic, intense temperament. They were impassioned readings that marked him for the rest of his life. In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times. The bookcases in the various homes he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.
“Even before his eyes began to fail he had his secretaries read to him, and then he read no other way because of the annoyance that eyeglasses caused him. But his interest in what he read was decreasing at the same time, and as always he attributed this to a cause beyond his control.
"'The fact is there are fewer and fewer good books,' he would say."
AMY GOODMAN: And that is from?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This is from The General in His Labyrinth. And, to me, the image of a warrior spending all his life fighting, but always carrying this huge retinue of books and somehow trying to read everything he could, is classic García Márquez.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to [Gabriel García Márquez] in his own words, as Juan read them, as well, from his book. This is him talking about himself as a journalist, and this reminded me of you, Isabel. He started out as a reporter in the early ’50s and returned to it periodically throughout his career as a novelist. This is part of a 1971 interview he did with the legendary writer Pablo Neruda.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] I would like to return to journalism, above all, to be a reporter, because I have the impression that advancing in literature, you lose your sense of reality. On the other hand, the work of a reporter has the advantage of every day being in contact with the immediate reality.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, that was García Márquez speaking in 1971. In this clip from the 1998 documentary, Gabriel García Márquez: A Witch Writing Literature, he talks about why he became a journalist.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] I’d say I turned to journalism because, for me, what was more interesting than literature was to tell about real things. From this point of view, journalism has to be considered as a literary genre, specially reportage. I’ve always defended this idea, because even the journalists refuse to acknowledge that reportage is a literary genre. In fact, they underrate it. For me, a reportage is a short story completely rooted in reality. Though a short story is also inspired by reality, so is fiction. No fiction has ever been completely invented. It’s always based on experience. I’ve realized the way I came to journalism was part of this process. It was just another stage, not in my getting a literary culture, but in the developing of my true vocation: telling stories.
AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts, Isabel Allende, on Gabriel García Márquez talking about journalism and fiction? You, too, started as a journalist and—
ISABEL ALLENDE: Many Latin American writers have started as journalists, and even as they became novelists, they continued working as journalists. I think the journalist gives you all the ideas. You are in touch with reality. You are in touch with people, listening to people’s stories. In my case, I started as a journalist, but I was a lousy journalist, and I never could stick to the truth, or I could never be objective.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Neither can most journalists.
ISABEL ALLENDE: Yeah, I could never be objective, and I’m sure he wasn’t, either, García Márquez. He’s making that up.
AMY GOODMAN: But you know that clip that we first played, where he is with Pablo Neruda, and for young people who are watching, listening or will read this in the next days, for those who don’t know who Pablo Neruda is, his significance, but also that meeting you had with Pablo Neruda a few days before he died, talking about journalism?
ISABEL ALLENDE: Well, Pablo Neruda was our second Nobel Prize for Literature, for poetry. The first one was Gabriela Mistral. And he was known all over the world. His poetry was translated all over the world. He won the Nobel Prize. And when he got sick, he went back to Chile, to Isla Negra, because he wanted to die and be buried in his house in Isla Negra where his tomb is now. There is a rock, and under that rock he and his wife are buried.
Shortly before the military coup of 1973, I visited him in Isla Negra. And it was a good day for him. He was—he was up and around with a poncho. We had lunch and a wonderful corvina, a Chilean fish, and white wine. And then I said, "Can I do the interview now, Don Pablo, because it’s getting late, and I have to go back to Santiago?" And he said, "What interview?" "Well, I came to interview you." He said, "No way. I would never be interviewed by you. You are the worst journalist in this country. You lie all the time. You can never say the truth. You put yourself in the middle of everything. You can never be objective. And I’m sure that if you do not have a story, you’ll make it up. Why don’t you switch to literature, where all these defects are virtues?"
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Pablo Neruda speaking to you. And in this last minute we have, your final thoughts on Gabriel García Márquez?
ISABEL ALLENDE: As I said before, my heart is mourning, but not my mind. In a way, I feel great sadness because he’s gone. But he has been gone for many years now. He has not been writing for many years. But the books are immortal, and they will always be with us, and I will be able to read them over and over forever. So he’s always with us.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for taking this time, Isabel—
ISABEL ALLENDE: My pleasure.
AMY GOODMAN: —for these brief days you’ve been in New York, to spend the morning with us. Isabel Allende, the great Chilean writer, one of Latin America’s most renowned novelists, now lives in the Bay Area in California. She’s the author of some 20 books, including Maya’s Notebook, House of the Spirits, Paula, Daughter of Fortune. Her latest book is called Ripper. She was born in Peru. Her family was in Chile, where she went back to. We will do the full interview with Isabel Allende about her work next week, but for now, this does it for Democracy Now! If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Special thanks to Andrés Thomas Conteris, to Clara Ibarra and, as well, to Robby Karran.
Headlines:
Deal Reached on Ukraine Crisis; Pro-Russian Separatists Stay Put
Talks aimed at easing the crisis in Ukraine have produced an agreement calling for pro-Russian groups to surrender government buildings in the eastern part of the country. The United States, Russia, Ukraine and European Union all backed the deal, which calls for the groups to disarm and vacate occupied areas. But the deal appears unlikely to ease tensions between the United States and Russia as Russian troops remain massed along Ukraine’s border. Speaking Thursday, President Obama warned the United States could take more steps if Russia does not back down.
President Obama: "Our strong preference would be for Mr. Putin to follow through on what is a glimmer of hope coming out of these Geneva talks. But we’re not going to count on it until we see it. And in the meantime, we’re going to prepare what our other options are."
Ukraine has offered amnesty to pro-Russian separatists as long as they are not suspected of serious crimes. But those occupying the government building in the city of Donetsk are so far refusing to leave.
Anti-Semitic Flier in Eastern Ukraine Denounced as Provocation
Masked men in Donetsk reportedly handed out fliers to Jewish people this week calling for them to register and pay a fee of $50. While the leaflets purported to be from a pro-Russian leader, the group has denied any involvement. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the fliers.
Secretary of State John Kerry: "In the year 2014, after all of the miles traveled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable, it’s grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable."
The pro-Russian separatists have denounced the fliers as a provocation, and the supposed order has not been enforced.
Novelist Gabriel García Márquez Dies, Author of "100 Years of Solitude"
The legendary novelist Gabriel García Márquez has died at the age of 87. He is widely regarded as one the century’s greatest writers. In his home country of Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos has declared a day of mourning. García Márquez’s masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," sold more than 50 million copies in 25 languages. In 1982, he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.
Gabriel García Márquez: "Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude."
We’ll spend the hour honoring Gabriel García Márquez in his own words and with the novelist Isabel Allende after headlines.
Iran Ahead of Schedule on Nuclear Deal; U.S. Releases Funds
Iran is ahead of schedule on diluting its supply of nuclear material under an agreement with the United States and other world powers. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has reduced its stock of highly enriched uranium by nearly 75 percent. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said the United States has taken steps to release $450 million in frozen Iranian funds.
Marie Harf: "To remind people, to this point all sides have kept the commitments made in the Joint Plan of Action. As Iran remains in line with its commitments under the JPOA, the United States and its P5+1 partners and the European Union will continue to uphold our commitments, as well."
Gunmen Attack U.N. Base Sheltering Civilians in South Sudan
In South Sudan, at least 20 people were killed when gunmen attacked a United Nations base where thousands of civilians were sheltering. A spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack.
Stéphane Dujarric: "This attack on a location where civilians are being protected by the United Nations is a serious escalation. The secretary-general reminds all parties that any attack on United Nations peacekeepers is unacceptable and constitutes a war crime."
On Wednesday, Ban Ki-moon warned up to a million people are facing famine in South Sudan unless immediate action is taken by the international community.
Former Salvadoran General Faces Deportation from U.S. for Role in Killings
A former defense minister of El Salvador is facing deportation from the United States for his role in atrocities during the 1980s, including the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero and the massacre of more than 1,000 people in El Mozote. Judge Michael Horn found General José Guillermo García helped hide the involvement of soldiers in the 1980 killing of four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador. Judge Horn said García "fostered, and allowed to thrive, an institutional atmosphere in which the Salvadoran armed forces preyed upon defenseless civilians under the guise of fighting a war against communist subversives." At the time, the United States was heavily backing the Salvadoran military. García received political asylum in the United States in 1990. The judge’s decision was issued in February, but released to The New York Times last week.
19 Arrested Protesting Deportations; Obama Blames GOP for Stalling Reform
Immigrants and their supporters from across New England blocked the entrance to a jail used to detain immigrants in Boston Thursday to protest the Obama administration’s record deportations, which have reached an estimated two million. Nineteen people were arrested while more than 150 others rallied to support them. The protesters want Massachusetts lawmakers to approve a bill limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities under the Secure Communities program. But speakers like Andrés del Castillo targeted President Obama.
Andrés del Castillo: "You are tearing us apart! You are allowing us, like in my family, not to testify to the fact that we suffer domestic violence, not to testify to the fact that we suffer so many different abuses! Why? Because we’re afraid to call police! Why? Because the police will send us to these people! Because the police will send our moms and our dads to jail! ... I also want to say, I direct that message directly to the president of the United States of America, Barack Obama! That is to you, as a son of an immigrant! As a son of someone else that comes from a different land, you should know better than any that we deserve rights, that we deserve dignity, and you should be recognizing our families!"
Family members of immigrants in detention or facing deportation have launched a hunger strike outside the White House as part of the #Not1More [deportation] campaign. Speaking Thursday, Obama placed the blame on House Republicans for blocking comprehensive immigration reform.
President Obama: "I know there are Republicans in the House, as there are Republicans in the Senate, who know this is the right thing to do. I also know it’s hard politics for Republicans, because there are some in their base that are very opposed to this. But what I also know is that there are families all across the country who are experiencing great hardship and pain because this is not getting resolved."
9/11 Tribunal Adjourns amid Claims of FBI Spying on Defense Team
The military tribunal for five men accused of planning the 9/11 attacks has been adjourned until June following reports the FBI tried to infiltrate the defense team. The judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, acknowledged an apparent FBI investigation on Thursday. Defense attorneys say the FBI recruited a contractor on their team as a secret informant. Agents apparently approached the contractor as part of a probe into how journalists obtained a document written by one of the defendants, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Youngest Person to Be Prosecuted for Terrorism in U.S. Gets 5-Year Sentence
The youngest person ever to be prosecuted on terrorism charges in the United States has been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in an online conspiracy to kill a Swedish artist. Mohammad Hassan Khalid was just 15 years old and living in Maryland when he began chatting online with a woman known as Jihad Jane, who is now serving a 10-year sentence for her role in the plot. Khalid’s attorneys had argued for leniency, saying his age and other factors made him vulnerable.
Missouri Mayor: "I Kind of Agreed" with Frazier Glenn Miller
Residents in the town of Marionville, Missouri, are calling for the resignation of their mayor after he made statements supporting the anti-Semitic views of Frazier Glenn Miller, the white supremacist charged with killing three people at two Jewish community sites in Kansas last weekend. Mayor Daniel Clevenger, who was just elected on Tuesday, came under fire after speaking to a local TV station about Miller.
Daniel Clevenger: "He was always nice and friendly and respectful of elder people. You know, he respected his elders greatly, as long as they were the same color as him. ... I kind of agreed with him on some things, but I don’t like to express that too much."
Report Finds Major Flaws in Handling of FSU Rape Case
A new report exposes critical flaws in the handling of a rape case involving star Florida State University football player Jameis Winston. In December, the local prosecutor said he lacked evidence to charge Winston. About a week later, Winston won the Heisman Trophy. Now The New York Times reports "there was virtually no investigation at all, either by the police or the university." Police closed the case without interviewing Winston, obtaining his DNA, or following "obvious leads" to identify witnesses, including one who videotaped the alleged assault. The university also failed to take action, allowing Winston to keep playing football. The mishandling appears to extend to other cases at FSU, and the report comes as students across the country demand their schools take action to hold students who commit sexual assault accountable. This week Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri announced what she called an "unprecedented" survey sent to 350 colleges and universities to collect information on how they handle sexual assault.
WBAI Radio Journalist Robert Knight Dies
The radio journalist Robert Knight has died. Over the years, Knight co-founded the investigative news series "Contragate," later known as "Undercurrents," and hosted "Five O’Clock Shadow" and "Earthwatch" on New York City’s Pacifica radio station WBAI. He won the George Polk Award for his radio reporting on the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama.
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