574
RICHARD HOWARD
THE ORDER OF THINGS
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. By Gabriel GarcIa Marquez.
Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Harper
&
Row. $7.95.
THE SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN. By Yasunari Kawabata. Trans. Edward
Seidensticker. Alfred Knopf. $6.95.
LOCAL ANAESTHETIC. By Gunter Grass. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Har–
court, Brace
&
World. $6.95.
These three splendid works are considered together - in part
fortuitously, because they have all become international celebrities this
year - but in part because they all have immense designs upon the uni–
verse, because they confer its entire meaning upon Nietzsche's reflection:
Everything that ever was is a fragment and a riddle, until the creative
will adds: but I wanted it to be that way!
Written in the fifties, when Garcia Marquez was still in his twenties,
two of this Colombian expatriate's short works were published here two
years ago as a book of short stories:
No One Writes to the Colonel.
Very
much colored, where they are not stained, by Hemingway, there is some
other intimation beyond economy, beyond toughness, about these tropical–
ities, some hope of wholeness suggested by a single imaginary site, by
characters referred to if not brought onstage, who participate in the
minds of all the others, by a shared history which is meaningful and can
speak.
Tout lieu pense par un homme,
Roland Barthes writes,
est une
forme:
thus Marquez refers from the first to an original city which he
calls Macondo, and to its inhabitants since the origin, by which he de–
vises - from Sir Francis Drake and some Duke of Marlborough or other
to a sports biplane and the banana exploitation - the form of his fic–
tion, as Joyce and Singer, exiles from home like himself, and as Jouhan–
deau and Faulkner, exiles from everything else, invented theirs: imagin–
ary towns with real men living in them.
After five years of silence during which he read Kafka and Virginia
Woolf in Parisian penury, during which he wrote film scripts in Mexico
and newspaper articles in Venezuela, and during which, indeed, Faulk–
ner released him into his vocation ("when I first read Faulkner, I
thought: I must become a writer"), Marquez wrote
Cien Anos de So–
ledad
which was published
(in
Buenos Aires) in 1967 and which has
become a great international success of esteem and even, we are told,
of
