Editor's Note: This review was originally published in Manhattan Book Review.
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| Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
It’s a rare volume that offers a retrospective insight into latent yet burgeoning genius. The late Gabriel García Márquez’s collection of journalistic writings, The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings, offers a glimpse into the literary giant’s gift for telling memorable stories, with characters and events that take root and linger in one’s consciousness.
Before his ascent to worldwide literary fame, García Márquez worked as a journalist in Colombia, progressing to reporting stints in France, Italy, Venezuela, and Mexico. This anthology includes 50 articles published between 1950 and 1984. The subjects range from political revolution to foreign policy maneuverings to the horrors of human trafficking and murder. Whether he’s writing about pimps or heads of states, García Márquez contemplates human suffering and the often-ruinous consequences of desire. In divulging imperfections among flawed humans, he manages to inspire empathy for human folly.
Journalists excel at their craft by bearing witness and recording history, and García Márquez mastered both. This volume offers the Nobel Prize winner’s astute observations, allegories and metaphors, and affinity for the macabre and fantastical. Some articles connect factual and lived reality with a supernatural bent, illustrating the author’s early forays into magical realism. The articles serve as an important reminder of why García Márquez was such a beloved storyteller: he fully understood the fragility of the human condition and, in so doing, made us feel his ruminative agony.
