Forty Years Of Insularity

I’d like to be able to join in the tributes to the late Gabriel García Márquez by quoting passages from his works that have inspired me, but the sad truth is that, while I have of course heard of him, and I am familiar with his critical reputation, I have never actually got round to reading any of his books. I’ve pretty much completely avoided magical realism in fact; Angela Carter, Juan Rulfo, not much else.

This rather embarrassing lapse has prompted me to reflect on how anglocentric my reading habits are. How many translated works have I read? There are the ancient classics – Homer, Ovid, Virgil, some other Greeks and Romans. Skip a millennium to Dante and Cervantes, then another gap to the 19th Century; quite a lot of Russian stuff – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov – Flaubert, Zola. Into the 20th Century there’s Kafka, Hesse. Nothing I can think of post-war though.

This is most unsatisfactory. The cultural life of entire peoples is literally a closed book to me. Inexcusable, in an age where just about any volume is available at the click of a button, but unlikely to change, since I’m already well behind with my list of English must-reads, and new stuff comes out all the time. I will try to tackle One Hundred Years of Solitude this summer though; Márquez did win the Nobel Prize, so I guess it might be worth my time…