Then came Márquez, like a drink of cold water in a parched land.
From the first paragraph, I was hooked. I read the novel in two days, moving through it as though caught in a fevered dream. When I finally finished, I felt like a newborn opening his eyes to the world. Nothing around me had changed, but everything seemed newly alive. The ordinary had recovered its mystery.
Since then, reading Márquez has been a pleasure I always cherish. "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "The General in His Labyrinth," and many others. I have also loved his wonderfully immersive autobiography, "Living to Tell the Tale," a hardbound copy I once found in a bargain bin for a mere ₱200,. This has opened another door into his extraordinary imagination.
His magic realism fascinates me because he makes the impossible feel perfectly at home beside the everyday. Ghosts linger, miracles seem commonplace, and history takes on the strange logic of a dream. Yet beneath the enchantment lies something unsettling. Márquez shows us how violence, injustice, and the absurdities of power can become so woven into the fabric of daily life that people eventually accept them as normal.
As a Filipino, I find this deeply resonates with me. I have often wondered about our peculiar capacity for astonishment and forgetfulness as a nation. We can be scandalized by a public controversy one week and carry on as though nothing happened the next. We watch familiar political names return, listen to competing versions of history, and witness events that would seem implausible in a novel, except that here they are, unfolding in real life. And somewhere in all this, we Filipinos find ways to laugh, improvise, endure, and carry on.
I recognize something of Márquez's world in that uneasy mixture of wonder, sorrow, humor, and resignation. His magic realism reminds me that what appears absurd is not always harmless, and that what has become familiar is not necessarily right.
Sometimes, we need literature to estrange us from our own reality, to make us see our world with fresh eyes. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to Márquez. He gives me back the world, strange and beautiful and troubling as it is, and reminds me never to lose my capacity for wonder, or my willingness to question what I see.
Comments