A Book Review by Rajesh Sharma

HarperVia, 2021. Pages 157

Memory is our gift and curse. It gives us identity but also makes us vulnerable. We do not want to remember that we live in time, in death’s shadow. A memoir, even a short one, is a marathon of heroic and tender remembering in search of reconciliation. It redefines the writer’s relation with time, with all that exists in time and will cease to exist with the passage of time.

Rodrigo Garcia’s A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes is a son’s memoir of his departed parents. He is a screenwriter and director based in Los Angeles, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s son. He is conscious of the weight he lives under, as the son of one of the greatest writers of all time. Probably that is why this book happens to be mainly about his father, bringing his mother in either incidentally or only briefly. For Rodrigo’s self-identity, the father-son relation is a complicated challenge. But the son rises to stand in his own circle of light, with a grace that impresses and touches.

He chose to grow outside his father’s shadow by following a different calling, yet the reader of this little book, which is both serious and light, cannot but admire his mastery of the craft of writing. He grieves without inhibition and writes earnestly about grieving. And his control never slackens. You watch him watching himself and can see that the control comes from a firmly maintained inner distance. You sense it also in the narrative economy and in the solemn rhythm and the pace which is of a mourning procession.

Rodrigo faces up to the harrowing reality of Gabo’s disintegrating self as dementia progressively eats away his memory. In the early stages of the affliction, the great writer is distraught by the prospect of a mind without memory. One day the secretary sees him standing alone in the garden and brooding. I’m crying, he tells her, but without tears. The coming end makes him immensely sad, he admits to his son.

That Rodrigo is a discerning reader with a passion for writing is obvious from his selection of the passages from Marquez’s novels that stand as epigraphs to the five parts of the book. Premonition lights them up, as if their writer had somehow foreseen his own fate inside the stories he spun. Rodrigo reminds the reader that for Marquez the demand of writing was absolute: ‘If you can live without writing, don’t write.’ The fulfilment it brought was also absolute: ‘There is nothing better than something well written.’ The director that he is, Rodrigo cannily chooses what to show of his father’s life and work to the reader. The glimpses unfurl like movie clips visualised with stunning clarity and detail. You get to see Marquez on his writing desk with his immense powers of concentration. You admire his austere discipline and perseverance. You are astonished by his disarming simplicity. He believed that nothing interesting had happened to him after the age of eight, which echoes in Rodrigo’s own unconventional conviction that ‘most things worth knowing are still learned at home’. Marquez was suspicious of the hierarchies between high art and people’s art and of the itch to intellectualise that afflicts some readers of literature. He chose the form of the novel to tell his stories but disagreed with those who thought it to be an easier, freer form. A novel had to have a rigorously worked out shape within which the story had to come alive.

Mercedes died in 2020, six years after her husband’s death. Rodrigo’s relationship with her was, in comparison, uncomplicated. She was a simple woman and had no higher education. When during Gabo’s memorial service the Mexican president described her as a widow, she squirmed. ‘I am not the widow. I am me,’ she would later say. In spite of her famous husband’s large shadow, she had grown to be ‘a great version of herself’, as Rodrigo says with a supreme bow to her memory.

This is a mourner’s memoir no doubt, but it is more about life. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez wrote: ‘It is life, more than death, that has no limits.’ His son has kept that faith.

January 8, 2022