The scandal of the century And other writings

Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014

Book - 2019

"From one of the titans of twentieth-century literature, collected here for the first time: a selection of his journalism from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s--work that he considered even more important to his legacy than his universally acclaimed works of fiction"--

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Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2019.
Language
English
Spanish
Main Author
Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014 (author)
Other Authors
Anne McLean, 1962- (translator), Jon Lee Anderson (writer of foreword)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf."
Translation of: El escándalo del siglo : textos en prensa y revistas (1950-1984).
Physical Description
xxiv, 302 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780525656425
  • The presidential barber
  • Topic for a topical piece
  • An understandable mistake
  • The lonely hearts killer
  • Death is an unpunctual lady
  • The strange idolatry of la Sierpe
  • A man arrives in the rain
  • The house of the Buendias
  • Literaturism
  • The precursors
  • The postman rings a thousand times
  • The Aracataca tiger
  • H.H. goes on vacation (fragment)
  • The scandal of the century
  • Are they in caracas the women who disappear in Paris?
  • "I visited hungary" (fragment)
  • The world's most famous year
  • Only twelve hours to save him
  • June 6, 1958: Caracas with no water
  • Misadventures of a writer of books
  • I can't think of any title
  • The sandinista heist : chronical of the assault on "the hog house"
  • The cubans face the blockade
  • The specter of the Nobel Prize
  • Telepathy without strings
  • The new oldest profession
  • Yes, nostalgia is the same as it ever was
  • Horror story for new year's eve
  • Magic Caribbean
  • Poetry, in children's reach
  • The river of life
  • Maria of my heart
  • Like souls in purgatory
  • Something else on literature and reality
  • My personal Hemingway
  • Ghosts of the road
  • Bogota 1947
  • Tales of the road
  • My other me
  • Poor good translators
  • Sleeping beauty on the airplane
  • Writer wanted
  • Obregon or the boundless vocation
  • Literature without pain
  • From Paris, with love
  • Return to Mexico
  • Okay, we'll talk about literature
  • That news board
  • Return to the seed
  • How do you write a novel?
Review by Booklist Review

Journalism was Nobel laureate García Márquez's first true love as a writer. This ensnaring volume gathers 50 incisive and surprising articles and essays published from 1950 to 1984, a small yet mighty sampling of his extensive nonfiction corpus. Here is García Márquez's mastery of storytelling and sardonic humor, as well as evidence of his embrace of the absurd and the inexplicable and his fluency in offering the telling detail. The title piece is a wry and gripping Felliniesque chronicle of a young woman's mysterious death in 1953 on an Italian beach, one of many dispatches García Márquez wrote for a Bogotá paper after being sent abroad to evade the trouble his reporting sometimes catalyzed. No subject was too humble, so deep was his curiosity about life, though his was truly a global perspective. The World's Most Famous Year juxtaposes an array of 1957 events, including Humphrey Bogart's funeral and the banning of rock 'n' roll on Cuban television. Other pieces examine paradoxes in Caracas, a Sandinista operation, and life in Mexico. Whatever his focus, García Márquez is discerning, mesmerizing, and provocative, his timeless journalism works of art and dissent.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This incisive collection of journalistic pieces from the 1950s to the '80s shows the acclaimed novelist and short story writer García Márquez (1927-2014) in his original guise, as reporter, which he called "the best job in the world." Even in short-form pieces, the Colombian Nobel laureate's skill at creating character, mood, and setting shines through, whether he is commenting on water shortages in Caracas, describing Budapest soon after the Soviet invasion, or exposing sex trafficking and prostitution in Paris. The early pieces are for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, which afforded García Márquez his first opportunity to travel abroad, as a roving correspondent in Europe, and the later examples mostly come from his column in the Spanish newspaper El País. The centerpiece is the eponymous work, a compilation of several columns from Rome describing a young woman's mysterious death, a detective novel-like narrative accompanied by perceptive commentary on the role of press and public opinion. As with any collection, some selections are more successful than others, but all reflect García Márquez's humor, graceful style, and ability to find the human interest in every topic. His many Anglophone fans will be pleased to have these newly translated examples of his writing to read. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Kirkus Book Review

An eye-opening collection of articles that reveal Gabo the journalist.New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson sets up this eclectic and transportive selection of 50 journalistic pieces from 1950 to 1984 by the Colombian Nobel laureate, noting in his introduction that journalism was Garca Mrquez's "first true love." In fact, the beloved novelist (1927-2014) called it the "best profession in the world." Editor Pera confesses that he purposefully chose pieces that "contain a latent narrative tension between journalism and literature" to showcase the author's "unstoppable narrative impulse." The titular article, the longest in the collection, written for El Spectador, which published Garca Mrquez's first short stories, is an account of the mysterious death of a young Italian woman in Rome in 1953. The atmospheric, serialized piece is told in chapter form and might owe something to Garca Mrquez's love of two "perfect" short stories he references in "Like Souls in Purgatory": W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" and Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." Many of the articles confront political and social issues, including the U.S. blockade of Cuba, the Sandinista raid in Managua, Nicaragua, the international trafficking of women, the death of his beloved Magdalena River from pollution and deforestation, and the Soviet intervention in Hungary. In "Misadventures of a Writer of Books," Garca Mrquez admits that a writer "has no other revolutionary obligation than to write well." He rages about bad teachers of literature who "spout nonsense," calls the Nobel Prize a "senile laurel," is convinced "Japanese novels have something in common with mine," praises "self-sacrificing" translators as "brilliant accomplice[s]," and mourns the death of John Lennon. In the lovely "My Personal Hemingway," Garca Mrquez recalls seeing him across a Paris street in 1957 and shouting out, "Maaeeestro!"The text is elegantly translated by McLean, and Garca Mrquez fans will welcome these fresh and lively examples of his beautiful, lyrical writing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Editor's Note  To the memory of Carmen Balcells and Claudio López de Lamadrid  Gabriel García Márquez called journalism "the best job in the world," and he identified more as a journalist than a writer: "I am basically a journalist. All my life I have been a journalist. My books are the books of a journalist, even if it's not so noticeable," he once said.  These fifty journalistic pieces by García Márquez, published between 1950 and 1984, were selected from the hundreds compiled in Jacques Gilard's monumental five-volume collection,  Obra periodística , in order to provide readers of his fiction a sample of his writings for the newspapers and magazines for whom he worked a great part of his life. He always considered his training as a journalist the foundation of his work in fiction. In many of the writings collected here, readers of his novels and short stories will find a recognizable narrative voice in the making.  Those who want to delve into the subject can find an exciting and erudite explanation of García Márquez's journalism career in the prologues of Gilard's compilation. As Gilard wrote, "García Márquez's journalism was mainly an education for his style, and an apprenticeship toward an original rhetoric." The first works of journalism published as books were the reportage  Relato de un naúfrago  ( The Story of a Ship-wrecked Sailor, 1970) and an anthology of articles written in Venezuela, Cuando era feliz e indocumentado ( When I Was Happy and Undocumented, 1973). Crónicas y reportajes ( Chronicles and Reportages ), a selection made by the author, was published in 1976 by the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura. A compendium selected by García Márquez's journalist col- leagues, Gabo periodista, published in 2012 by the Fundación para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano and Mexico's Conaculta, also provides a detailed chronology of his career. Although some of his first fictional stories were written before he worked as a reporter, it was journalism that allowed the young García Márquez to leave his law studies and start writing for El Universal in Cartagena and El Heraldo in Barranquilla. He later traveled to Europe as a correspondent for El Espectador of Bogotá. Upon his return, and thanks to his friend and fellow journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he continued to write in Venezuela for the magazines Élite and Momento, until moving to New York City in 1961 as a correspondent for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Later that year he settled in Mexico City with his wife, Mercedes Barcha, and his son Rodrigo, where he published No One Writes to the Colonel, began working in screen- writing, and later devoted all his time to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude . Although his work as a writer would occupy most of his time, he always returned to his passion for journalism. During his lifetime he founded six publications, including Alternativa and Cambio: "I do not want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspapers," he said. The Scandal of the Century takes its title from the masterful reportage sent by García Márquez from Rome and published in fourteen consecutive installments in El Espectador in September of 1955. In those five words we find a condensed journalistic headline with a touch of literary hyperbole. The subtitle's fantastical and evocative imagery is signature García Márquez: "In Death Wilma Montesi Walks the Earth." Among the pieces are press releases, news reports, columns, op-eds, features, and profiles. The reader will also find a few literary pieces published concurrently in the press or in literary magazines. In selecting these writings, I have tried to avoid any academic, stylistic, or historical categorization. As a reader and editor of García Márquez, I have chosen texts that contain a latent narrative tension between journalism and literature, where the seams of reality are stretched by his unstoppable narrative impulse, offering us the chance to once again enjoy the "storyteller" that he was. In these works, readers will also see the journalistic skills that García Márquez brought to his works of fiction. "But those books have such an amount of research and fact checking, and historical rigor," he said of his novels, "that in fact they are basically great fictional or fantastic reports, but the method of investigation and the way of handling the information and the facts is that of a journalist." The reader will find journalistic texts from his youth in which the budding narrator tries to find a reason to cross the line into literature, as in the opening story about the president's barber, early snippets of narrations where characters or places that will populate One Hundred Years of Solitude begin to appear; a reportage from Rome about a young woman's mysterious death in which the country's political and artistic elites appear to be implicated, where García Márquez attempts a mixture of police procedural and the society pages that brings to mind La Dolce Vita; an investigation into tracking of women from Paris to Latin America that ends with an interrogation; overseas wire dispatches presented as short stories; reflections on his craft, as he does in many of the articles written for El País in later years; and dozens of other stories that bring us back the García Márquez we miss. For this edition, I have worked with Anne McLean to bring to the English translation the same feeling of immediacy of the original, avoiding any notes, as García Márquez advised in his article "Poor Good Translators," included here. Remembering Gregory Rabassa's masterful work on One Hundred Years of Solitude, he writes, "He never explains anything in a footnote, which is the least valid and unfortunately most well worn resource of bad translators." The same goes for the decision not to x some mistaken Italian names or the incorrect lyrics of some Beatles songs. About that, he writes that a text should "pass into the other language just as it was, not only with its virtues, but also with its defects. It is a duty of loyalty to the reader in the new language." Finally, a paragraph and a half, missing in Gilard's edition from a section titled "A crucial half hour" within "The Scandal of the Century," was restored from the original version found in Crónicas y reportajes . I owe a special debt to Carmen Balcells and Claudio López de Lamadrid, who put this project in my hands. I had already worked with García Márquez on his memoirs, and we had spent a lot of time in his house in El Pedregal working on I'm Not Here to Give a Speech . As always, my immense gratitude to Mercedes, Rodrigo, and Gonzalo for their suggestions and advice. The legacy of the journalistic work of Gabriel García Márquez continues its journey through the Fundación para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, lead by Jaime Abello, through workshops where hundreds of journalists from around the world have been and still are trained every year. My greatest thanks to Gabo himself, for his confidence and support of my work. And especially for his friendship. --Cristóbal Pera Excerpted from The Scandal of the Century: Selected Journalistic Writings, 1950-1984 by Gabriel García Márquez All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.