Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 509

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview and Other Conversations."

One Hundred Years of Solitude was, as a perceptive critic once said, like a brick through a window. It let in the real life of the street, the noises and colors and sensations, and presented magical events—a trail of blood flowing across town and into a house, careful to avoid staining the rug; flowers from heaven—so straightforwardly they seem believable. Suddenly all the stories in Latin America were written in its shadow. Solitude was the most famous novel in the world, and perhaps the last (leaving aside the rather extra-literary case of The Satanic Verses) to have a demonstrable effect on it.

MENDOZA: You always have yellow flowers in your house. What significance do they have? 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Nothing awful can happen to me if there are yellow flowers around. To be absolutely safe, I need yellow flowers (preferably yellow roses) and to be surrounded by women. 

MENDOZA: Mercedes always puts a rose on your desk. 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Always. What’s happened quite a few times is that I’m trying to work and not getting anywhere, nothing’s going right, I’m throwing away page after page. Then I look at the flower vase and find the reason … no rose. I shout for a flower, they bring it, and everything starts coming out right.

STREITFELD: I liked one other quote from The Paris Review article, where you told the writers who had long sentences that you had to use “breathing commas.” 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: My idea of a literary text is actual hypnotism. It’s very important that the rhythm does not have any stops and starts, because when you have a stop or a start, the reader can escape. There are too many other books waiting. Any hurdle and the reader will go pick up something else. Commas may seem like a grammatical sign, but I use them for respiratory purposes. The reader must not wake up.

STREITFELD: There is a stamp in Colombia with your face on it. 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I hope it’s only used for love letters.