Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin

Author:Gerald Martin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction: History
ISBN: 9780307271778
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-05-05T01:33:04+00:00

PART III

Man of the World:

Celebrity and Politics

1967–2005

17

Barcelona and the

Latin American Boom:

Between Literature and Politics

1967–1970

THE GARCÍA BARCHA FAMILY arrived in Spain on 4 November 1967.1 After almost a week in Madrid they travelled to Barcelona. They intended a quite brief stay but, as in Mexico, they would remain almost six years.2 Once again it would be impossible for García Márquez to work as a journalist because the press was ruthlessly censored and he was a figure of international renown. But this would turn out to be a blessing: the separation from journalism and politics in Mexico City had coincided with one big book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and in Barcelona it would coincide with an almost equally large one, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

To many the journey to Barcelona seemed a curious venture for a left-leaning Latin American, and García Márquez had always claimed to have avoided visiting Spain out of hatred for the Franco dictatorship.3 Mexico was the most hostile of all Hispanic countries to the Spanish regime and it was certainly an irony that García Márquez would travel from there to live in a country from which so many of his Catalan friends in both Mexico and Colombia were exiled. But although he would usually deny it, the spectacle of the old Spanish dictator near the end of his life and power was inevitably a stimulus to the writing of the book he had long since planned on an even more geriatric Latin American tyrant, a literary one whose power would seem eternal to his helpless and long-suffering subjects.

In fact there was much else to be said for the decision. His literary agent, Carmen Balcells, was in Barcelona and was already on her way to becoming one of the most influential agents not only in Spain but in the whole of Europe. With the Seix Barral publishing house and many others already in existence or springing up, Barcelona was, despite Franco, at the very centre of the 1960s publishing boom in Latin American fiction. Behind it was a renascent if necessarily muted Catalan nationalism and an economic upturn which, despite everything, the policies of the Franco dictatorship had recently begun to foment. The raw material fuelling the publishing boom was of course the creative “Boom” of the Latin American novel itself of which García Márquez was already the brightest star.

He arrived in Barcelona at the very moment the Boom’s importance was becoming clear. The unparalleled albeit temporary openness of horizons which characterized the 1960s created an aesthetic moment of extraordinary fertility. This openness, this choice between alternatives, is clearly visible in both the subject matter and the structures of the canonical Latin American texts of the era. All are about the historical formation of Latin America, the contribution of both history and myth to contemporary Latin American identity, and, implicitly, about its possible futures, both good and bad.

Looking back, the intense historical moment that was the Boom ran from 1963, when Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela) appeared, to 1967,

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