1.
When relatives visited my home city of Cali during the ’80s and ’90s, my father would take them on the Magical Tour. These were the peak years of the city’s infamous drug cartel, an organization that came to control eighty percent of the global cocaine trade, and the tour consisted in loading everyone into our old Nissan Sentra and driving around the neighborhood to see the mansions of the major drug lords — often called
mágicos, or “magic ones,” due to their near-miraculous abilities to generate wealth. At the neighborhood’s entrance was
Miguel Rodriguez’s house, a fortress that occupied two entire blocks and whose two parts — as we had learned from a contractor friend who had worked on the project — were joined by a secret passageway dug beneath the road. A little farther down on the street, entirely hidden behind a twenty-foot wall decorated with glimmering white stones, was the house of
Joaquín Mario Valencia, another major kingpin, and next to it were the concrete ruins of a veritable castle that was never completed due to the murder of its owner. The major highlight of the tour lay little more than a block from my house. It was the home of
Chepe Santacruz, number three in the cartel’s hierarchy, who had built himself a replica of the most exclusive social club in the city after its members had denied him admittance. This mansion he eventually tore down, and when some years later he was killed in a gunfight with the police, he left unfinished an even greater architectural taunt at his enemies: what was to be a twin sister of the White House. Call it magical realism.
Not surprisingly, this is a kind of magic that my compatriots and I would rather forget. It pains us to remember those days, when the only version of our country that foreigners knew was “Locombia,” a mythical hellhole infested with murderous barbarians. This skewed narrative was so dominant for a time that we have often reacted by taking the opposite extreme, denying there was any truth in it at all. But one need not accept the bizarre portrayal of Colombia that appears in movies like
Mr. and Mrs. Smith — where Bogotá, a cosmopolitan metropolis of nine million people, is portrayed as a sweaty backwater at the edge of a jungle — to acknowledge that we have indeed known something of the gates of Hell. The problem, however, is that this take on the country has too often obscured all that has long made countless people, both locals and foreigners, fall deeply in love with Colombia. And I don’t mean only now, when the travel writers at the
New York Times seem to have developed an infatuation with the country and Gallup has crowned it the happiest nation on earth. The truth is that the Colombia of the ’80s and ’90s contained within itself Hell and Paradise all at once, each in its full force, neither diluting the other. This point is essential to understand why so many of us have taken to calling our beloved Nobel Laureate, the late
Gabriel García Márquez, the most important Colombian who ever lived. Some may consider that an excessive title for someone who made up stories for a living. Yet as the country plunged into the bloody chaos of narco-terrorism, his works not only held together our identity as a people, but in an unexpected sense brought our history to fruition, breaking the curse of our solitude, of which he so eloquently wrote.
2.
Early in his Nobel acceptance speech, “The Solitude of Latin America,” García Márquez describes the legendary city of Eldorado as “our so avidly sought and illusory land.” In many ways, this is truly an apt metaphor not just for Latin America in general but Colombia in particular, under whose Guatavita Lake the golden city was supposed to lie. Colombians have long seen their country as a potential paradise, one that has unfortunately always remained just beyond the bend of the nearest hill. In the experience of our culture and history — from the mysterious rhythms of our
cumbias and
vallenatos that speak of Africa and old Europe, to the yellow butterflies that forever fluttered around the tragic figure of Mauricio Babilonia in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, and which we have adopted as an unofficial national symbol — we intuited something profound and valuable in our experience that was nevertheless passed over by world history. We saw ourselves cut off, in particular, from the Western tradition to which we believed we rightfully belonged, like a juvenile delinquent in the family who is to be pitied and occasionally sent to rehab, but never consulted about family decisions.
Since the time of the country’s struggle for independence against Spain, however, Colombia has always had greater aspirations.
Simón Bolivar, the Liberator, dreamed of a united Latin America, one that would advance the cause of democratic freedom in a world still dominated by monarchies — a southern counterpart to the United States with its capital in Bogotá. The dream was born in 1819 with Gran Colombia, whose territory encompassed modern-day Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and Colombia, as well as parts of Peru, Brazil, and Guyana, but it died in its infancy with the country’s breakup barely a decade later.
It’s a dream that would have stayed dead, had it not been for our beloved Gabo and
One Hundred Years of Solitude. His previous books had been praised by critics, but they sold only modest numbers of copies. In contrast, within a week of the release of
One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, the entire print run sold out. From its first paragraph, which references a firing squad, a troupe of travelling gypsies, a fifteenth-century suit of armor, the idea that inert objects have souls, and the notion of harnessing magic and wonder in service of the profit motive, the book broadcasts the broadness of its vision and historical sweep.
The novel, which goes on to tell the story of a family who founds the fictional town of Macondo, is really the history of the world, Colombian history, and the Bible all rolled into one. Colombians immediately understood that it perfectly captured — if not the details of a typical Colombian life — certainly what it
feels like to be a Colombian. The Buendía family is our family, each one of our families, down to their maddeningly repeating names and their fear that marriages between relatives will lead to a child with a pig’s tail being born — an image that soon entered our popular lexicon. My family’s own pig tail is bad hips, which not just my grandfather but three of my aunts and uncles have had to get replaced (with several others likely to follow in their footsteps). As for names, the million José Arcadios and Aurelianos in the book are rivaled in my family by a plethora of Marios, Gonzalos, and Alejandros, whom my American wife has had a fun time trying to keep straight every time we visit. As for seemingly fantastical events, what Colombian family does not have a list of them? Off the top of my head, I can think of the miraculous healing of my grandfather, the ghost that haunted his farm, the eerily accurate presentiments of my great-grandmother, and the time an accidental shot from a rifle left a hole in the wall directly behind my aunt while somehow missing her entirely, all of these being widely acknowledged as simple facts of the family’s history.
This way of looking at the world, which García Márquez so gloriously explored in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, indeed places family at the center of history itself, and sees things as infused with meanings — not just in literature, but also out there in the world, in themselves. García Márquez was, after all, a lapsed Catholic, and it is hard not to see the influence in his writing of the sacramental vision of reality that formed not only his early years, but his culture at large. His genius was to take this experience of the world — one that his writing revealed to be not just that of Colombia, but of Latin America more generally — and bring it to the level of epic poetry, which is what
One Hundred Years of Solitude really is. Such poetry, which in his Nobel speech García Márquez described as giving wind to Greek civilization in
Homer’s “overwhelming catalogue of ships,” or “bearing up, in the delicate scaffolding of
Dante’s tercets, all the dense and colossal fabric of the Middle Ages,” he both brought to and formed out of the soul of Latin America. In doing so, he did for us what all the great epics have done: transformed a people from a tribe into a civilization. He thus accomplished what Simón Bolivar never could, not at a political but rather a spiritual level. As his work resonated throughout the world, culminating in his 1982 Nobel Prize, he gave us a voice in the great conversation of history, ending, in a sense, our solitude.
If this all sounds too grandiose, let that too count as evidence of the great debt of gratitude that Colombians owe to Gabo, which cannot help but express itself in an inability to remain impartial about him. His work is, in Colombia, not only high art but also popular culture, as widespread as the songs of
Shakira. His Nobel,
our Nobel, became a vindication of our existence on the world stage, especially during the two decades that followed when we threatened to slip into the status of a pariah country. Like nothing else — not even soccer, and that’s saying something — his books united us across ideological boundaries, this despite Gabo’s own socialist stances in the midst of a country waging a war against deeply corrupt and unpopular Marxist guerrilla groups.
3.
His death comes at a time when a new, modern Colombia is emerging, raising the question of what will happen to this identity that he helped to craft. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabo leaves us a final warning through the famous episode of the insomnia plague, a mysterious sickness that strikes the town of Macondo. “When the sick person became used to his state of vigil,” the book tells us, “the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.” When news of the disease first reaches the town’s inhabitants, however, no one sees a reason to be alarmed. “If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” one of the main characters states, “That way we can get more out of life.” Even after hearing about the consequent loss of memory, most characters laugh at the warnings. Soon, however, the foundations of their world begin to erode, and Macondians are forced to begin posting signs next to every imaginable item in order to remember its name and its use. They post bigger ones to remind themselves of their place in the universe (“Macondo”), as well as who put them there (“God exists”). This approach works for a while, but in a telling sentence the narrator explains that “the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves.” It is not hard to see how all this relates to a world in which the word “reality” most often brings to mind a television show in which cameras follow a group of impossibly beautiful people trying to outwit each other within some absurd scenario.
But why exactly does insomnia lead to amnesia in Macondo? García Márquez gives no straight answers, but he mentions in a significant passage that despite their lack of fatigue, some inhabitants nevertheless desperately want to sleep, simply “because of the nostalgia for dreams.” The insomnia plague thus becomes uncomfortably familiar, the vision of a society trying to “get more out of life” by bowing down before the relentless imperatives of doing and producing. In this distorted understanding of
carpe diem, people lose the capacity to dream, and soon the immediate present becomes all that exists. It is not long before characters start using tarot cards to read the past as well as the future.
García Marquéz leaves us, then, with the challenge of once again claiming a place at the table on our own terms, of creating a Colombian and Latin American modernity that is true to our vision of who we are, one that can harness globalization and material progress without sinking into an idiocy with no past, without sacrificing family and the souls of things to the god of GDP per capita. Time will tell whether the real Macondians will be “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” but at least we can say without hesitation that thanks to García Marquez, we did have a second opportunity on earth.
In her exquisite memoir, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes movingly of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Shelley gave birth to four children, but only the fourth survived. “In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children,” Solnit writes:
It probably goes without saying that you’ll crave different solitudes at different moments in your life, both in books and in physical places. I have an immense love for loud books. Novels like, say, Nick Harkaway’s, about which I’ve rhapsodized at length, books that come galloping into your life with their doomsday machines and schoolgirl spies and ninjas and leave you daydreaming for days afterward about clouds of mechanized bees. But on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the immense pleasure of novels like Teju Cole’s Open City, which I finally got around to reading a few weeks back. Very little happens in Open City, plotwise. It’s a very intelligent meditation on memory, dislocation, family, music, national identity, and other interesting topics, but the action is mostly a man wandering the streets of New York. I found it mesmerizing.
1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
5. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Great quiet essay. Summer Book was so enchanting. Perfect.
“Both are falling, but David is waiting for Mel to fall first, so that he can catch her.” Possibly the best line I’ve read all week.
I’ve always loved quiet books (Marilynne Robinson is a special favorite), so thank you so much for this short list. I would also add Stoner, previously covered by The Millions, except that I haven’t finished it yet so no guarantees.
I read the title of this essay and immediately thought of The Summer Book, which I found by chance in a used bookstore. I had no idea what it was about or who the author was, but it seemed like exactly the type of book I needed at the moment. It was peaceful and gentle and nostalgic.
Thanks for this essay. I’ll be searching out the Yoon and Berlin books, especially. I’m in the middle of The Summer Book (which I’d saved for summer reading, of course!) and am enjoying its distinctive pace. I can recommend Jansson’s The Winter Book, too, but perhaps you might save this until winter arrives?
As for Cole’s Open City, I found his novel is be an increasingly disquieting quiet read, to the moment when I realized that all his walking is an attempt to put emotional distance on a disturbing event in his past. Then his quiet novel, at least for me, became very loud indeed. I found this book to be even more rewarding when reread . . .
A great list! I can’t wait to look into some of these novels. “Open City” and “Gilead” are beautiful. Might I recommend that “Tinkers” or (if Paul Harding’s first is any indication) “Enon” be added to your list?
This essay was a graceful, quiet read itself, and the list of recommended books is fantastic. Thank you!
As soon as I read the title of this article, I thought of “The Summer Book”, as some have mentioned. What a beautiful way to express the pleasure of quiet reads!
I have read the Snow Hunters. Very good book and a moving story!
I get the occasional need to seek books which provide comforts from the difficulties of everyday life, but the idea that a novel should adhere to some “loud” vs. “quiet” spectrum me is a largely useless dichotomy, if not a timid prescription that would be thrown out of any English class. Fiction should be flexible enough to inhabit ALL emotions: to make the reader laugh and cry, to give the reader noise and quiet (and if you’re seriously viewing OPEN CITY as a “quiet” novel, you’re clearly ignoring, if not misreading, the very loud pain that is buried within Julius and that is just as clamorous as any Harkaway vision).
This gormless and egregious essay is little more than a retread of the dreaded and utterly useless “unlikable” characters debate. It is designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader, one who imposes her own dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity onto Goodreads and Amazon, who diminishes the full range of literature and discourages authors from taking chances. That this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion is a mark that nobody here is especially interested in minding the store and stirring up real debate and answering to the more serious challenge of how to stay subtle and rational-minded in literature when the world is a mess that no amount of hiding will declutter.
The last few lines are exactly what I envision when I think of a “quiet” novel. Perhaps “quiet,” then, is a misnomer.
Re: Edward Champion comments, above
I’m a big fan of Emily St. John Mandel and someone who has no concern about “likability” in either my characters or my own interactions. I like my fiction quiet. I like my fiction rough. Don’t care, so long as it’s good. Ms. Mandel’s essay displays the same lovely writing style and quietly but sharply perceptive sensibility that marks her fiction. She is a young writer I value and I look forward to following her career.
As for Champion’s hatchet job, what nonsense. Nothing she is writing about has anything to do with the “unlikable” characters debate. You, sir, have totally missed the point. A “gormless and egregious essay?” “Designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader…” “Dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity.” Balderdash!
As for your galumphing and harrumphing umbrage that “this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion….” All I have to say to that is… Get thee back to your murky lair under the bridge, Troll!
Sincerely
Moe Murph (Definitely not the quiet type)
Washington, DC
I endorse Maureen’s defence of this essay; it seems churlish to attack it so venomously. The tone was surely intended to be slightly humorous and conversational, to stimulate the kind of friendly, literary discussion one would prefer to see in these comments – not an unwarranted, egregiously misguided attack! Let’s have a bit of quiet, calm comment, please.
Gilead is a marvel. So free of irony and guile and tortured self-consciousness.
I think Evan Connell’s pair of novels, Mr Bridge, and Mrs Bridge, can be tagged Quiet. So uneventful you can’t put them down. You cant wait to see what doesn’t happen next. Another way of saying that every sober paragraph, every mundane moment, feels (quietly) momentous.
Maureen: How have I missed the point? Would you care to actually offer a defense/? Do you actually have an argument? No, you don’t. And I do. And I will happily debate you at length (or, for that matter, the pusillanimous Emily St. John Mandel, who remains “quiet” and reveals her limitations as a thinker with her silence) using specific examples and taut arguments. But, of course, you have nothing more in your cheap rhetorical reticule other than asserting that the proposition is wrong. Is that too “loud” for you? Have I upset your fragile minds by calling you out on your indolent thinking? Oh dear.
Simon Lavery also belongs in the dunk tank for failing to argue. Neither of you can offer a bona-fide position. You only wish to declare my viewpoint wrong. That doesn’t fly in any real debate. Are either of you familiar with a constructive argument?
You people are what’s wrong with America. Learn how to think or you’ll end up dead and useless.
Re: Edward Champion
My above short comment was in reply to you, I just forgot to name you as the intended recipient, the point being that “quiet” simply refers to a style of writing and not the entirety of the literature put in such a category. Every dichotomy can be deconstructed, but that doesn’t change the self-evident difference in writing style between Marilynne Robinson and, say, David Foster Wallace. And, yes, there are differences in writing style between the authors listed in the article above, but I’m sure you can wrap your “rational” mind around the axis of difference we’re adopting here that shows a greater difference between “quiet” and “loud” styles of literature than between works of “quiet” literature. Again, this isn’t a rigid axis, and the standard is subjective, but, of course, you already knew that, given that literary tastes are always subjective—-as are the taste (or lack thereof) in “rational” comments.
(Why do I feel like I’ve just been trolled?)
Emily wrote, “some novels are quiet, whereas others are loud,” which is a pretty clear-cut rigid dichotomy that is even more problematic than the speculative riffing Zadie Smith was doing in her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel.” The fact that you, CJ (or should I just call you Lee Siegel?), and Emily would rather ascribe a taxonomic element to writers as deeply complicated and as variegated and as rich as Marilynne Robinson and DFW reveals that you are not especially interested in unpacking the literary ideal I described above: once again, that fiction should encompass ALL human qualities so that one does not approach the act of reading literature in the same crass manner as one orders from a Taco Bell drive-thru.
Re: My dear friend Ed,
This will be my last post on this thread, and I want to apologize on behalf of both of us for making a bloody mess of the bottom half of this page when such a beautiful article starts it off. Ed, if you still want to continue, you’re on your own.
Despite the fact that you obviously aren’t looking for an open-minded discussion rather than looking for a mole to whack with your hammer of a brain, I still find just enough logic in your post to warrant a response. Since you’re going so analytical on me, you should also know, of course, that the “some . . . , others . . . ” construction is not delimiting, as opposed to “some . . . , the others . . . .” The sentence you cited could easily have continued, “and others have pink covers, and others still are written in Greek.”
To return to the contention at hand, I’ve already mentioned that the axis chosen is arbitrary. That does not preclude other equally valid axes from being chosen, resulting in equally valid comparisons. A rationally minded person such as yourself should know very well that the first step to “unpacking” anything is to draw distinctions; otherwise everything is equally singular as everything else and no meaningful comprehension can be made whatsoever outside of, “Oh, that’s a work of fiction.” You obviously believe that more can be said, given the arbitrary standard that you put up: “fiction should encompass ALL human qualities.” Ergo, under this rubric, the closer a work of fiction is to this goal, the better it is. There is no universal truth that supports your axis as “better” or “worse” (or other such nonsense dichotomies) than any other; and I might mention the fact that democracy has no logical connection with truth.
But that brings me to my third and last point: You’re begging the question. This article never said that “quiet” works are better than “loud” ones always and forevermore. Did your cherry-picking skip over how the author said “I have an immense love for loud books”? And the numbers on the list have no ordinal value attached to them at all, not even implied in the text. There is no evidence period that the author is promoting a “taxonomy” of literature; even if there were, you have provided no argumentation supporting the harm that such a taxonomy would cause to your “literary ideal,” which, again, is as arbitrary an axis as the one you so “rationally” seem worked up about.
Even when I know I’m having my time wasted, I find this article too good to not defend. (And that, my dear Ed, is a subjective literary taste.)
I am so grateful for this essay. Just gave me two more books to my “to read” list–The Summer Book, and The Harp in the South.
I’d like to add three more books that I consider quiet books, very powerful, poignant, and unforgettable, and these are the trilogy by Kent Haruf–Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction. About the lives of people in an imaginary town in Colorado, called Holt.
I realize that I am slow to add my comments here, and so probably no one will even get to this little submission, but just in case one person reads my suggestion, and then gives these books some attention, I will be satisfied.
Oh Mr. Champion, could you please be quiet?
Thank you so much for this article, Ms. Mandel. I’ve never conceptualized novels in this “loud” and “quiet” way, but it seems like a really useful way to think about books
.
It also helps me personally, as a reader, because lately I keep picking up “quiet” books that I’m sure I’ll like, reading for fifty pages, and then just forgetting to finish them! It’s baffled me, because I know intellectually that the book is good, but I can’t get into it. Whereas when I’ve picked up something like “John Dies at the End,” I can’t get enough of it. I think I set a record finishing that book!
What a lovely essay. I have Gilead in my to-read pile and might just move it up now. I have not read the others on this list but they are now on my list too.
I can’t recall if I’ve thought of books as quiet or loud but, yes, I get the meaning. And, as I think through my reading this year, I think The Book of Ebenezer Le Page would fall into the “quiet” category as described here – although it is a book that covers an entire man’s life over some 60+ years and filled with so many lovely characters. Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, which I re-read this year, might fall into the “loud” category, even though I loved it even more this time around.
Thank you for this lovely piece.
Yes, Mr. Champion please do shut up. What a gormless and egregious windbag you are.
Good article, I’ll have to check out some of these books.
Ironically it ended up provoking the loudest noise I think I’ve ever seen on this webpage. For a second I thought I was on thermps or htmlwhatever with the kids.
Love books like these; thank you to Emily for giving me more to read! Have always loved the quietness of So Long, See You Tomorrow by James Maxwell. Its refusal to draw attention to itself makes it all the more compelling.