Goodbye, Dream Seller!

“A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”--- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

THE boom-time litterateur Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) left us selling his dreams. I never thought someday I would feel the urgency of writing something on him right after his demise. But when I heard the news I could not restrain myself from jotting down some words which were wandering through the realm of my mind. I along with one of my maternal uncles, Sumon mama, passed many nights discussing only Marquez and his writings. I can recall a night when I was just talking about Marquez and my mama was hearing me with a lot of zeal. The discussion began at 11 pm. When we felt that we needed to have a short-time break the chirping of birds informed us it was already 6 am. Then my mama asked me how we passed seven hours without an iota of pause! I replied it became possible because we were having a chat on the magic realism of Marquez. This is the way Marquez pervaded my consciousness during my early university days.
One of my friends once told me he had never read a book like Marquez's The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. Before I forget I must admit I first heard about Marquez from my teacher, Syed Manzoorul Islam, who I believe, can analyze Marquez better than anyone else. Before reading Marquez I had heard many things on Marquez from him. I was so influenced by Islam's speeches that I felt compelled to translate Marquez's selected short stories from English to Bengali. Before the publication of my book of translation, Selected Short Stories Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I was excited, wondering how a man could weave such brilliant stories around a lot of tiny issues.  It is relevant to mention here that Marquez believed in the tradition of storytelling and so does Syed Islam. Furthermore, another author who loves reading Marquez much is Anisul Hoque. At the last Ekushey Book Fair, we had had a discussion on Marquez.
Marquez-lovers may have already guessed that I have grabbed the title for my essay from one of Marquez's short stories, 'I Sell My Dreams'. Obviously Marquez sold his dreams through his stories and novels throughout his lifetime. But those dreams were derived from realism. The realism Marquez inserted into his writings invariably seemed like magic. Thereupon he became the most believable magic realist of the world. It is interesting to note that Marquez never considered himself a magic realist, though readers always find him a magic realist. Marquez says: 'There's not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.'

At this point, I would like to share the main ideas of four must-read novels and a short-story collection of Marquez, which are pregnant with many thought-provoking lines. Pardon me, this must-read selection is completely mine and it may not be similar to your choices.
Allow me to begin with One Hundred Years of Solitude, the most famous one, which chronicles seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo. For years, the town has no contact with the outside world, except for gypsies who occasionally visit, peddling technologies like ice and telescopes. The protagonist remains a leader who is also deeply solitary, alienating himself from other men in his obsessive investigations into mysterious matters. The novel unfolds the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo, a substantial theme of the book. The book also disseminates the idea that 'there is always something left to love.'
In the second phase, the name which automatically comes to mind is The Autumn of the Patriarch, massively sold in Spain in 1975. Garcia Marquez spent ten years researching dictatorships from Pinilla to Trujillo and from Franco to Peron --- and then tried to forget everything he had heard and read to invent this story of a self-styled “General of the Universe”. The novel opens with the discovery of the tyrant dead on the floor of the presidential palace, “older than all old men and all old animals on land or sea”, before exploring moral decay and political paralysis in what the author called a “poem on the solitude of power”. The book is divided into six sections and each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypical Caribbean tyrant. From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best and the worst of human nature. At this moment I can recall one of the most celebrated lines from the novel- “A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”
My third choice is Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Before I give you a bit of detailed information regarding the novel, I feel the necessity of citing the following lines from the text: “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.” Indeed, the novel tells how the love between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza is thwarted by Fermina's marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera, only to be rekindled more than 60 years later. Some critics choose to consider Love in the Time of Cholera as a sentimental story about the enduring power of true love. Others criticize this opinion as being too simple. Garcia Marquez himself said in an interview, “You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.”
At first I thought I would include News of a Kidnapping in my list of choices. But the work which haunts me is Memories of My Melancholy Whores --- the story of an old journalist, who has just celebrated his 90th birthday, seeking sex with a young prostitute, who is selling her virginity to help her family. Instead of sex, he discovers love for the first time in his life. The line I love most from the novel is, “No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.”
You are now welcome to the world of Marquez's short stories. The collection I had gone through while doing my Masters is entitled Strange Pilgrims. All the stories in the collection take place in Europe. However, it is a slightly more rustic Europe than what some would imagine. With no real effort, Marquez plainly speaks of the places where these stories take place, making grand destinations seem normal, as only one who has lived in such places can. All the stories are based on his real life experiences. In a word, the twelve stories in the collection chronicle the surreal, haunting 'journeys' of Latin Americans in Europe. I feel I need to quote a line from a story titled 'Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane': 'I had always thought that there was nothing more fascinating in all of nature than a beautiful woman.'
Finally, let me refer to British novelist Ian McEwan's views on Marquez, made known after the demise of the writer. McEwan said Garcia Marquez's work had “almost a Shakespearean quality.” For myself, I have understood Marquez's relevance through Einstein: 'Imagination is more important than knowledge'.
Note Marquez again:
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”

Tusar Talukder teaches English at Central Women's University. He loves to translate. He can be reached at [email protected]