Gabriel García Márquez - The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings

The world recognizes Gabriel Garca Mrquez as an extraordinary novelistthe beloved creator of Colonel Aureliano Buenda and of Macondo, of the epic love between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, of the death of Santiago Nasar, and of the colossal, solitary dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch. For all of this, he received the maximum literary recognition possible, a Nobel Prize, and when he did, the Spanish-speaking world rejoiced at the sight of one of their own, one of the seventeen children of the telegraphist of Aracataca, standing before the Swedish monarchs to receive his distinction.

But Garca Mrquez, or Gabothe affectionate nickname by which he was known in the Hispanic worldwas more than a novelist. He is also remembered for having been the friend and confidant of Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, as well as Julio Cortzar and Carlos Fuentes and his other colleagues of the Boom, and for having been the husband of Mercedes Barcha and the father of two sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, and when he died in 2014, multitudes of people thronged to his funeral, which was held in the beautiful palace of Bellas Artes in the capital of Mexico, his longtime country of residence. When Juan Manuel Santos, who was then the president of Colombia, Gabos birthplace, said that he had been the best Colombian of all time, no one challenged the assertion.

In addition to all of that, Gabo was a journalist. Journalism was, in a sense, his first true love, and, like all first loves, it was the longest lasting. The profession of journalism helped form him as a writer, which is something he recalled forever afterward. His admiration for journalism reached the point where he proclaimed it, on one occasion, with his characteristic generosity, to be the best job in the world.

Gabos hyperbole was inspired by a sentiment of genuine respect and affection toward a profession that he made his own at the same time as he took his first steps as a writer. In 1947, his first year at the Universidad Nacional in Bogot, Gabos first short stories were published in the daily newspaper El Espectador. He already wanted to become a writer, but had entered law school in order to please his father.

I T WAS NOT LONG, however, before Gabos academic life was interrupted by political violence. The April 1948 assassination of the charismatic Liberal politician Jorge Elicer Gaitn in Bogot triggered an outbreak of violent public unrest in the Colombian capital lasting several days. During the chaos, which became remembered as el Bogotazo, Gabos student residence went up in flames and the university itself was closed indefinitely. It was the beginning of a civil war between the countrys two main political parties, the Liberals and their rivals, the Conservatives.

The conflict, which would become known as la Violencia, would last a decade and cost the lives of some 200,000 people. Colombia would never be the same, and nor would the life of Gabo. To continue his studies, he moved to the city of Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast, and signed up at the university there. He also began to collaborate with a new local daily paper, El Universal, and, before long, gave up his studies altogether to devote himself to writing full-time. He soon began writing articles for El Heraldo, a newspaper published in the larger, neighboring city of Barranquilla, and he moved there in 1950. These were happy and formative years for Gabo, in which he was surrounded by other young creative personalitieswriters, artists, and bohemianswith whom he became friends and who together made up the so-called Group of Barranquilla. While living in a flophouse that doubled as a bordello, Gabo eked out a living as a columnist, writing under the nom de plume Septimus, and he completed his first novella, Leaf Storm.

T HIS ANTHOLOGY FOCUSES ON the unique journalistic legacy of Gabriel Garca Mrquez via a selection of fifty of his articles published between 1950 and 1984. The pieces assembled here were selected by Cristbal Pera, who worked with Gabo as an editor on his memoirs, culling from the exhaustive collection of Gabos journalism compiled by Jacques Gilard, the late French Hispanist, for his extraordinary five-volume anthology of Gabos work published in the 1980s.

The Scandal of the Century takes us from the early writings of the young, unknown Gabo of his Barranquilla days through nearly four decades, into the mid-1980s, when he was a mature, internationally renowned author. Among other things, this anthology reveals Gabo to have been blessed with abundant talent from the start, as well as an easygoing sense of humor, and a writer whose journalism is barely distinguishable from his fiction. Indeed, in his explanation for this selection, Pera tells us that he chose the works that most revealed Gabo as the storyteller he was, in which the seams of reality are stretched by his unstoppable narrative impulse.

In Topic for a Topical Piece, for instance, Gabo writes about the difficulty of finding an appropriate topic with which to begin a piece. There are those who turn the lack of a topic into a topic for a journalistic piece. The choice is absurd in a world like ours, where things of imperceptible interest are happening. After reviewing a series of curious stories appearing in the newspapersincluding one telling of how the daughter of the Spanish dictator, the Generalissimo Francisco Franco, was getting married, and that her bridegroom, his future son-in-law, or