“It defeats provincialism at every level”
There are all sorts of personal connections you make to a book. For me, thirty years ago, a nineteen-year-old father attending a commuter college ten minutes from my home, a first-generation college student who had never been east of Wyoming or on an airplane, let alone out of the United States—for me to pick up a book and not only be taken to another place but another time was huge. It’s as if the world explodes—its boundries and limitations. The very way you see is changed. It defeats provincialism at every level, you know, a great book like that.
When I started reading, as a child, I loved adventure, and I was very much aware of the inventiveness in plots. But there’s a big difference between that kind of reading and what happened when I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. It’s as if for the longest time you can only hear the lyrics to songs, and all of a sudden, after reading a book like that, you can also hear the music.
The writing itself was the inventive part. Adventure was no longer just what happened to the characters but in the way that language could be used and formed. It’s funny; at this point in my life, there isn’t enough room upstairs to turn around. There are so many stories in my head! But I’ve never forgotten the beginning of that book: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
It’s an entire novel in one line, but I guarantee that if you start a novel with a firing squad, people will read it. It’s the greatest hook you could ever have. You have a distant afternoon, you have wistful nostalgia, you’re in a place where they have firing squads but have never heard of ice. You have everything. You’re in a world that has elements you recognize, and some you don’t.
To choose as a book that changed your life a work in translation means you also must compliment the translator. Gregory Rabassa’s work in translating García Márquez is so fine that he’s really a collaborator. One line that sticks with me is: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” I had never heard of something called magical realism. I was just taken away by the sheer mystery and unfamiliar nature of the language, some of which comes from style, some of which comes from translation, and some of which comes from my limited education at that time. But that’s one of the reasons we read, to go to places we wouldn’t get to go otherwise.
The copy I read was a small mass-market paperback. Books for me are a sense memory. When I see that cover, I can feel my infant daughter Brooklyn lying on my chest in the park that spring, as I turned the pages, during the short breaks I had between classes and part-time jobs. Well, that sweet little baby just turned thirty, and the funny thing is, this book is part of her story, too.
Growing up, she shared my love for books. “Give me something great to read,” she was always saying as a child. When Brooklyn was nineteen or twenty—the same age I was when I first read Màrquez—she went to India to do some relief work with a charitable organization. She asked for “a bunch of paperbacks I can just read and throw away” so that she wouldn’t be too burdened by her luggage. So I went to a store and bought a bunch of mass-market-sized paperbacks. They had a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I grabbed that and put it at the very bottom.
While Brooklyn was in India, there was a horrible monsoon and power outages; this was ten or eleven years ago, before there were cell phones that worked reliably overseas. Her mother and I (we’re divorced, and I’m remarried) weren’t able to reach her for a few days, and we had no idea where she was. We were so scared. Finally the phone rang and I answered it. She said, “Dad!” I said, “Oh my god, you’re safe?” She said, “Yeah, yeah! I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Oh my God, it’s amazing!” For the next five minutes we talked about One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then she goes, “My favorite part of the book is [click],” and the phone went down.
Brooklyn now directs the writing center at Washington State University, supervising the tutors who help students with their writing. I think often of that little girl who always asked me to recommend good books to her. “I want a book that has great characters and amazing language,” she’d say, “a book that transports me somewhere else.” I sent her the manuscript for Beautiful Ruins, right after I finished it. She called me, her voice full of emotion, and said, “Remember all those years when I asked you for that book? This is it.”
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Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins, is a former National Book Award finalist and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His work, including five previous novels, a book of short stories, and one nonfiction book, has been translated into thirty languages, and his essays, short fiction, criticism, and journalism have been widely published.