THE film of the movie, particularly showing how special effects are achieved, has become a standard way to promote Hollywood productions. Now publishing has taken a frame from the celluloid reel and is bringing out a whole raft of books by top authors on how they conceived and wrote their novels.
Recently, Umberto Eco and Milan Kundera published their musings on writing in thin, overpriced volumes. Gabriel Garcia Marquez now joins them with The Fragrance Of Guava - but in this case it works beautifully.
Cynical readers expecting a thinly disguised 'how to write' manual, or a lazy biographer's first draft, should abandon themselves to this work. In interviews given to a former journalistic colleague from Marquez's days at the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, the Colombian Nobel laureate emerges as a fascinating and endearing person who prefers anecdotes as a mode of expression, rather than grandiose theories.
Marquez does not merely talk about how his books were conceived, how he struggled with the plot and formed the characters, like so many other writers do. He reveals how his stories grew out of the society and politics of the Latin America of his day - the era of the dictators.
Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who edited the Latin American literary journal Libre in Paris in the 1960s, carried out the interviews, and he adds an interesting nostalgic touch to his gentle proddings over Marquez's radical political leanings. Mendoza includes his own explanations of life and events during the times Marquez speaks of, putting the whole dialogue in context.
What emerges in this 125-page volume is a portrait of the Latin intelligentsia in the period of struggle against the generals, a history of the mentality of an era when left-wing intellectuals were seen as dangerous communists, most of them fleeing to Europe to escape being 'disappeared'.