Magic realist turns to realism

Not much has been heard from Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez lately, except for a somewhat spurious missive circulated in the Internet a couple or so years ago, which was supposedly his valedictory and farewell amid a losing battle with cancer. The real author was subsequently unmasked, and for his efforts got his 15 minutes of fame, but it hardly cured Marquez of whatever it is that ails him, much less push him out of a debilitating silence.

It might be correct to conjecture that Marquez’s scarceness, be it forced or self-imposed, is an offshoot of that school or movement of literature which he helped propagate, magic realism, itself having quite a number of local proponents. Marquez though set the benchmark with One Hundred Years of Solitude in the late ’60s, that opened the floodgates, as it were, of similarly inclined authors from Latin America. It was that novel that became largely the basis for Marquez’s Nobel award in 1982, apart of course from thick sheaves of short stories and maybe two or three other novels.

But what happens if a magic realist like Marquez, who cut his teeth as a reporter in his native Colombia, ventures into realism? This is what he delves into in the 1997 work of creative non-fiction, News of a Kidnapping, about a series of abductions of mostly media or related figures by the extraditable narco-traffickers of Marquez’s troubled South American country.

Colombia is no stranger to such kidnapping phenomena even today, when there are headlines still of similar kidnappings by assorted rebels bargaining for amnesty or protection, whatever’s the case. It is a scenario that can be eerily familiar to Filipinos, who have gotten used to the bloody antics of the Abu Sayyaf and other guerrilla groups. Colombia, though, is a known locale of narco-terror, and which subject Marquez explores in novelistic style in his book, whose Spanish title is Noticia de Un Secuestro.

For the most part Marquez goes about his exposition in a style verily like his fiction, but here at least was an extended truth that was stranger than anything he’d ever written. He’d been down this street before, relying on painstaking research to reconstruct actual events verging on the historical if not fantastic.

Among these previous works of creative non-fiction – really an oxymoron, but there are already courses being offered of that name in university – written by Marquez are the sort of biography of the legendary general and great liberator, Simon Bolivar, entitled The General in his Labyrinth, and a chapbook-looking account of a castaway at sea under suspicious circumstances, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. In both cases the author relies heavily on the tricks of literature, featuring long and winding descriptions that can get the reader drunk, and punctuated with a one-sentence quote that hits like sudden insight or well-placed profundity.

But unlike the two previous books where the lines between genres were somewhat blurred and so allowed Marquez enough leeway for his imaginative pursuits, News of a Kidnapping has to be reined in due to the sensitive topic, including security concerns for those abducted and their relatives as well, to a certain extent, the author himself. This was no ordinary journalistic occurrence that could be expounded on at will or made into a conceit for literary consumption – two of the hostages of the Medellin drug cartel died.

Marquez, understandably had to do more than stick to the facts – he reconstructs the events down to the last abominable detail, including the lengthy nerve-wracking period of detention, and sketches too the villains in a dispassionate way. The chronicler’s treatment of the subject is worthy of the best no-holds-barred journalism, but without the sensationalist, breaking news-conscious slant of most modern reportage. Marquez takes his time and well he should – treading carefully as he unravels his noticia, at times exhibiting a prudence that makes him sound like a hostage negotiator.

Yet the paradox is that the closer Marquez sticks to the facts as he soberly relates them, the more we get the feeling that this is the stuff that makes the dime store novels and whodunit thrillers such sleepers, hitting the bestseller lists and staying there for months without even trying.

To his credit, Marquez for all his literary bent remains faithful to his role here as investigative journalist, striking the difficult balance between objectiveness and compassion. It has always been a dangerous country we live in, and what more Colombia where soccer players who make the fatal mistake of producing an own goal are fair game for the syndicate hit man.

News of a Kidnapping comes out as not just mere reportage, not only a story within a story, but can be many things at the same time – yes, it can even be read like a novel, for stranger things have happened – like mirrors repeating images to arrive at that ever elusive quicksilver of a truth or consequence.