Gabriel García Márquez (15 page)

While Stalinism reigned unabated in the Soviet Union, the West read the works of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and others. Kafka's novels
The Metamorphosis, The Trial,
and
The Castle
were cautionary tales about the evils of a pervasive government bureaucracy and the suffering of a middle class trapped by authoritarianism. On the other side of the spectrum, Proust's multivolume
À la recherche du temps perdu
(In Search of Lost Time), brilliant in its use of introspection, was an example of a self-serving, narcissistic genre. Proust didn't seem to care about plot. As the latest practitioner of an art that focused on the human experience, he appeared to have forgotten a crucial player in the literary equation: the reader. His novel was described as indulgent, hyperpsychological, and individualistic to a fault.

Joyce's novel
Ulysses
was not about reality but about language. A retelling of the
Odyssey
through a day in the life of
Dublin as seen through the eyes of a young Irishman, Stephen Dedalus; a Jewish antihero, Leopold Bloom; and Bloom's unsatisfied wife, Molly, Joyce's narrative was an extraordinary example of the novel pushed to its extremes. In
Finnegans Wake,
Joyce took the novel further.
Finnegans Wake
was about nothing; it was about itself. Successors like Samuel Beckett, who was Joyce's student, assistant, and friend, followed the same path.

By the time García Márquez began publishing books such as
No One Writes to the Colonel,
both Europe and the novel, which is a distinctly European literary genre, appeared to have run their course. As if forced to revitalize the novel, a fresh chorus of voices began to be heard from what was considered the periphery of Western civilization: Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and Latin America. For centuries, these parts of the globe had been deemed secondary, reactors to rather than producers of culture. The renewal of the novel as a genre took place precisely in these regions because they were unencumbered by the guilt that resulted from the military destruction in the Old World. There was a sense of freedom and inventiveness that was conducive to a literary rebirth.

Participants of that renewal were Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, Chinua Achebe in Nigeria, Kenzaburō O – e in Japan, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, Amos Oz in Israel, Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Juan Rulfo in Mexico, and the writers of
El Boom,
with García Márquez as the prime example. To some literary historians, this was “the return of the savage,” a movement by subordinate artists in an effort to take control of their own destinies. Others describe this narrative effulgence as “the rise of the postcolonial mentality.” What characterized the collective effort was the conviction that the concept of “Western civilization” was too narrow, too confining. The world was more open and elastic, its talent was no longer concentrated in a single geographic spot. It was democratic, egalitarian, and spread out across nations.

The emergence of new narrative voices forced readers to realize that the novel was a literary genre up for grabs. Writers from different countries could appropriate it and adapt it to their needs by employing a new language, a new style, a different way of telling stories.
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The concept of originality was redefined. It now included the infusion of folklore from other traditions. Equally important was the emergence of a new reader, for the novel was no longer European property. Nations all over the world used the genre to explore local motifs. Those explorations were targeted to a local audience as much as they were destined for a global readership.

It would be foolish to suggest that novels had not been published anywhere else but Europe until then. The opposite is true. In Latin America, the genre had made some headway in the nineteenth century with works such as José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's
The Itching Parrot
and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's
Facundo: or, Civilization and Barbarism.
Those novels were clearly designed as tools to meditate on individual and collective concerns, such as poverty in urban centers, the role of minorities, and gender relations. But these books were generally derivative in their approach, closely imitating European models. The new post-war literature was far less dependent on foreign ideas. Although it used universal archetypes, it had assimilated the European heritage in a way that allowed for freedom to create in accordance with the writer's own milieu.

Two major factors in the success of
El Boom,
and of García Márquez in particular, were the introduction of literary agents to Latin America, and, through them, the idea of a continental literature that could reach far and wide through translation. It would be impossible to imagine García Márquez's career without Carmen Balcells. A Catalan with offices in Barcelona, Balcells had worked as an unsuccessful theater administrator, among other jobs, before joining the exiled Hungarian novelist Vintil
Horia when he opened a literary agency. It was doing
quite poorly until Carlos Barral, a flamboyant literary editor at the publishing house Seix Barral, asked Balcells—also known, because of her large size, as
Mamá Grande
(Big Mama), after García Márquez's character, and as Female Agent 007—to sell foreign rights for his authors. As Mario Vargas Llosa once put it in a tribute to Balcells in
El País,
it was a decisive moment not only for her but for the publishing industry in the Spanish-speaking world, and through negotiations, the industry on the international level. At various points, she represented Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Carlos Fuentes, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique.

According to Vargas Llosa, at the end of the sixties, when he was teaching at King's College, part of the University of London, Balcells showed up one day in his London apartment and told him: “Quit your teaching immediately. You have to devote yourself exclusively to writing.” He replied that he had a wife and two children and didn't want them to starve. Balcells asked what his yearly salary was. He responded that it was around five hundred dollars. “I will give you that amount, starting at the end of this month. Leave London and install yourself in Barcelona, which is cheaper.” Vargas Llosa followed her instructions to much success. He lived in Catalonia's capital for the next few years, describing those as the happiest of his life.
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It was through Carmen Balcells's agency that
El Boom
became a global phenomenon. Several authors (Vargas Llosa for
The Green House
and Guillermo Cabrera Infante for
Three Trapped Tigers
) won the Biblioteca Breve prize, which Barral managed. Through Balcells's efforts, this translated into a huge publicity campaign in the Spanish-speaking world. Bookselling in Latin America was, until then, defined by national boundaries. The major literary capitals were, in order of importance, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Buenos Aires was the home of publishing houses Editorial Losada and
Editorial Sudamericana. Self-described as a European city in the Southern Cone, it prided itself on having a high-brow literary culture; its periodicals, such as
La Nación
and
Sur
—under the support and editorship of its founder, Victoria Ocampo—included literary supplements. It was in
Sur
where Borges published some of his most influential essays and stories and where national, continental, and foreign authors sought to have their work in print. Ocampo sponsored translations of Waldo Frank, Oscar Wilde, Ranbindranath Tagore, and Virginia Woolf. Exiles from the Spanish Civil War who had arrived in Buenos Aires contributed generously to maintaining a sophisticated literary discourse.

There was no transcontinental distribution strategy, so books published in Buenos Aires weren't readily available in other parts of Latin America. Books that enjoyed good word of mouth were passed on from one person to another; that was the only way devotees of a particular author could get a copy of a recently published novel or collection of stories. The same was true in Mexico City. There were publishing houses such as Fondo de Cultura Económica, created by historian Daniel Cosío Villegas in 1934 as an inexpensive venture to make the nation's classics available to the masses. There were elite houses such as Ediciones Era, founded by exiles of the Spanish Civil War. But Mexican books rarely traveled beyond the nation's borders.

As a publishing center, Cuba was a distant third. The island was an intellectual hotbed during the nineteenth and early parts of the twentieth century, and attracted exiles from the Spanish Civil War who were involved in publishing. The island's prime geographic location in the Caribbean Sea and its value as a commercial getaway for the Americas had earned it the nickname “the pearl of the Antilles.” It may have been smaller than those of Mexico and Argentina, but in the sixties Cuba's publishing industry received the strong backing of
Castro's regime. It undertook a mammoth effort to make books available to everyone at cheap prices, a project that was burdened by heavy censorship; the Communist Party wanted only a certain type of material made available to the population. Cuban books didn't travel abroad.

All this to say that the Spanish-speaking world, from the Iberian peninsula to the Pampas, was a fragmented market. Readers in one city didn't have access to titles published in another. It was a reflection of the limited impact of books, and of the printed media, in the Spanish-speaking world. Balcells changed that. Through publicity and a trans-Atlantic marketing strategy, Balcells made the writers of
El Boom
a phenomenon throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This, in large part, was the result of her success in selling foreign rights to New York, Paris, Rome, and other cultural capitals.

In
No One Writes to the Colonel,
a curious dialogue about censorship takes place. The Colonel waits for the mail in front of his friend the doctor's office, and the two have a conversation about Europe, its wellbeing, and how easy it is to get there by boat. At one point the postman opens the mailbag but finds nothing for the Colonel, only a bunch of newspapers addressed to the doctor. Disappointed, the Colonel doesn't even bother to read the headlines. The passage reads: “He made an effort to control his stomach. ‘Ever since there's been censorship, the newspapers talk only about Europe,' he said. ‘The best thing would be for the Europeans to come over here and for us to go to Europe. That way everybody would know what's happening in their own countries.'”
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Balcells achieved something along the same lines. By selling world rights to works by Latin American writers, she generated, in their respective countries, the feeling that they needed to be read because in the major cultural capitals they were being applauded as talented representatives of their respective national idiosyncrasies. Balcells had been García Márquez's
agent since November 1925. In 1965, Balcells and her husband, Luis Palomares, visited García Márquez in Mexico City. She had just come from a tour of the United States, where she had stopped in New York City to visit various publishers, including Cass Canfield Jr. at Harper & Row. Given the solid reviews García Márquez's work had received everywhere, Balcells managed to get a four-book contract with Harper & Row for a total of $1,000. She was eager to meet García Márquez for the first time and give him the wonderful news. García Márquez greeted her with enthusiasm but told her: “
Es un contrato de mierda.
” He had worked intensively on those four books. Getting only $1,000 was ridiculous to him. However, he did sign a contract, dated July 7, 1965, with Luis Vincens as a witness, authorizing Balcells's agency to represent him in all foreign languages for 150 years.
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El Boom
was greeted with an uproar in different corners of the Spanish-speaking world. Was it a legitimate showcase of talent? Or was it a publicity-driven campaign devised by a savvy Barcelona agent? Wherever they went, the writers became targets of debate. In his memoir,
The Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History,
first published in Spanish in 1972, José Donoso, the author of
Coronation
and
The Obscene Bird of Night
and himself a member of
El Boom,
describes how, in spite of the hoopla, no author that was part of the movement was able to make ends meet exclusively from the royalties. With the exception of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Donoso writes, “I do not believe that the author's rights of any Latin American writer can justifiably be called ‘substantial.' On the contrary, the life of
El Boom
writers is and has been rather difficult and their greatest struggle is to steal a few hours for writing from the work that grants them a modest subsistence.”
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El Boom
attracted the most publicity not through García Márquez, who in spite of the critical accolades was a rather opaque author, but through Carlos Fuentes. It was thanks to
Fuentes that the “legend of luxury” was born. Fuentes “embodied for the devouring eyes of the writers of an entire continent that triumph, that fame, that power, even that cosmopolitan ‘luxury' which from the isolated Latin American capitals seemed impossible to obtain,” Donoso wrote. “He was the first to handle his works through literary agents, the first to have friendships with the important writers of Europe and North America—James Jones loans him his apartment in a famous hotel on the Ile-St. Louis; André Pieyre de Mandiargues and William Styron receive him as a friend—the first to be considered a novelist of the first rank by North American critics, the first to realize the magnitude of what was happening in the Spanish American novel of his generation, and, generously and chivalrously, the first to make it known. His flamboyant character colored and gave shape to the phenomenon itself as viewed by a growing public. But even for Fuentes, who, outside of having his own income, which he supplemented with his work for publishing houses and movie studios, things have not been as easy as it appears, not even in that first moment of the Boom, when he embodied it and really could say: ‘
Le Boom c'est moi.
' He had never had the fame, the true fame of a popular novelist beyond the range of the Spanish language, despite
Mademoiselle
telling its readers:
Hâtez-vous, Mesdames, connaissez Fuentes.
When he arrived for the first time at the offices of Gallimard, his publisher in France, to ask to meet the director who had just bought his first novel, the secretary asked him for his name and he gave it to her. The secretary's look continued to be inquisitive and disconcerted as if she were waiting for clarification which Fuentes hastened to provide: ‘
Je suis un romancier mexicain.
' In the presence of something so incredible, the secretary could not restrain a ‘
Sans blague . . .!
'”
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