Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died. Newspapers will of course
have had their obituaries ready for some time, but that reminds me too much of
the time I had to dig a grave for a terminally ill dog, couldn’t do it with the
dog itself watching, and so had to dig by the light of a hurricane lamp and a
crescent moon, after the dog had died. It would be too impertinent, even for
me, to give an off-the cuff critical assessment of the great man’s work.
It is remarkable how personally
people are taking his death: the common reader, who knows only his books
but has not met the man, seems to have lost a friend; a writer who was (and
many aren’t really) on the reader’s side.
His best-known novel is ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’ and
everybody remembers the bit where the villagers start to suffer from
progressive but selective amnesia: they forget common nouns; the names of
things, and have to attach labels: ‘Cow’, ‘House’, ‘Bicycle’, ‘Bucket’. It
could be a synecdoche for the writer’s work. My own favourite among his novels
is ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’.
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Notable events on this day in other years are the great San
Francisco earthquake of 1906, and (according to the calendars of the Orthodox,
Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches) the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
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