When asked how he started writing fiction, Gabriel García Márquez told the Paris Review that it began with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: “The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. It reads: ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”

Naturally, that brings to mind the famous opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “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.”

Kafka’s influence is clear throughout the rest of the novel, García Márquez taking the idea that anything can happen and running with it. In the first chapter we meet a man who grows old and then young again. We hear – accurate – premonitions of the future. We are told of a hen who “laid a hundred golden eggs” and see magnets that can start nails and screws straining to leave beams and furniture. This world is unconstrained by conventional ideas about physics and reality.

But another thing García Márquez learned from Kafka was that however twisted his ideas might be, his narrative voice should be straightforward. You get a special sense of wonder through describing a world where ice is no more or less remarkable than a ghost who keeps bothering you in your bathroom, a world where the risk of children being born with pig’s tails is accepted as a fact of life.

But it wasn’t just Kafka who inspired García Márquez. The Colombian also attributed some of his storytelling style to his grandmother: “She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness … What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”

One of the most famous examples of García Márquez’s brick face comes early in the book when one of the José Arcadios dies in his bathroom, apparently (although this isn’t entirely clear) after shooting himself in the head. After the gunshot echoes through his house, we are told about the journey a “trickle of blood” takes through the town of Macondo in the same matter-of-fact tones people use when describing traffic conditions. The blood “went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left.”

On the one hand, this is presented as no more unusual than, say, my recent trip up the A140 to Cromer. On the other, it’s a trail of blood – and not only that, it is blood with good enough manners that it hugs the walls “so as not to stain the rugs” and, blood with a purpose, alerting the novel’s matriarch Ursula of her son’s death. This exemplifies the possibilities of García Márquez’s brand of magical realism, so rich in sensory detail (along the blood trickle’s journey, we are made to think of begonias, Ursula in her kitchen cracking eggs, a shout of “Holy Mother Of God” and of the smell of gunpowder).

What could sadder than the blood of a son going home to his mother? Or what more daft? Why should we invest in a world where anything can happen? Isn’t that the same as a world where nothing matters? Because the only governing rule is the whim of the author? How far can we suspend our disbelief?

I have often felt cynical when faced with magical realism, but I was able to quieten that small voice in the back of my mind while reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude. It did ask “really?” as I followed that blood – but it didn’t stop me from feeling the emotional resonance when the trail led to Ursula. There’s something about García Márquez that helps him get away with a good deal. “A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it,” he said. And possibly the most magical thing about his writing is that we do believe.





