Remember how the “most handsome and well-mannered” Italian blond Pietro Crespi died in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)? On November second, he died, under the lights of innumerable lamps and amidst the mad concert of music boxes and all the clocks that struck an interminable hour, “at the desk in the rear with his wrists cut by a razor and his hand thrust into a basin of benzoin.”
Gabriel García Márquez once compared writing to carpentry. In an 1981 interview, he told Peter Stone, “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. Both are very hard work … both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work is involved … I never have done any carpentry but it’s the job I admire most, especially because you can never find anyone to do it for you.”
While recollecting his father’s memory, Rodrigo Garcia wrote that Gabo woke up every morning fearful of losing his path in the treacherous terrain of a novel and by breakfast he worried that “if today doesn’t go well, the whole novel might be a bust. If that’s the case I would abandon it”, but by the time of lunch, he would come out confident enough from his study to announce that “he was writing the best novel since the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century”.
