30 novels, day 10: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
The power of a perfect opening sentence:
“Many years later, as
he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that
distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
It was a sweltering
summer in Edmonton. Sharon and I were living in a small one-bedroom apartment
near Whyte Avenue, without air conditioning. I had just discovered Garcia Marquez’
novel set in the steaming Colombian jungle, and it seemed to me I wasn’t just
reading the book, I was living it.
One afternoon the apartment was so unbearably stifling that I filled the bathtub with cold water, added all the ice cubes from every ice
cube tray we had in the freezer, and climbed in. Brief but blessed
relief.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was an astonishing book on every single page, but I kept coming
back to that effortless, unforgettable opening sentence, and to the scene, postponed for several pages, when Aureliano finally sees and touches ice for the first time as a boy and says, "It's boiling."
I kept coming back to that block of ice encountered in a
tropical jungle, the very first wonder in a book teeming with wonders.
Anything in the world, the novel taught me, could be magical when placed in
stark contrast, when transformed by a visionary way of seeing.
Around that time I was
working on what eventually became my first novel, Icefields, a somewhat magical realist tale set in the Canadian
Rockies. In one scene I had my characters sipping tea from delicate china cups
while looking out the window of a resort hotel at an avalanche thundering down
the mountainside. That moment of contrast, the teacup and the avalanche, I owe
to Garcia Marquez.
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