The greatest writer of my lifetime died just now. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winner, inventor of magical realism, fearless journalist of the evil lunacies of South American politics, passed away at 87. He had been suffering from lymphatic cancer, which he had endured, with appropriate unlikeliness, since 1999.
He will be remembered by writers for his complete and utter mastery of the opening sentence. Novelists, when they set out to write a novel, dream of an opening as fine as those in his books. Publishers, when they really want to rhapsodize about a novel, say "the opening line was like Marquez." High school English teachers write his opening sentences on chalkboards to show students exactly what quality is.
I predict that the obituaries will all mention what most critics consider his greatest beginning, the line that starts One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." It is a magnificent line, no doubt. But I prefer Love in the Time of Cholera, which has as magnificent a beginning as any novel I have read:
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escape the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
It just makes you want to read whatever has come afterwards, with the fervent hope that the writerly dream never ends. Writers have the good fortune of leaving their own obituaries. Let that be Marquez's.
