This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Jun 2008, by Tashfeen Mahmud.
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21 Jun 08
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I think it all comes from nostalgia.
<!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --><!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) -->Nostalgia for your childhood? For your country?
Nostalgia for my country and for life itself.
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Originally you came from the Caribbean, and your books reflect the feverish, overflowing life of the region. Is that where you found the magical realism that bas made your work so popular around the world?
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In the Caribbean there's a perfect symbiosis-well, let's say one more evident than elsewhere-between the people, daily life and the natural world. I grew up in a village hidden away among marshes and virgin forest on the Colombian north coast. The smell of the vegetation there is enough to turn your stomach.
It's a place where the sea passes through every imaginable shade of blue, where cyclones make houses fly away, where villages lie buried under dust and the air burns your lungs. For the Caribbean peoples, natural catastrophe and human tragedy are part of everyday life.
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I should add that the area is soaked in myths brought over by the slaves, mixed in with Indian legends and Andalusian imagination. The result is a very special way of looking at things, a conception of life that sees a bit of the marvellous in everything. You find it not just in my novels, but also in the works of Miguel Angel Asturias in Guatemala and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba. There's a supernatural side to things, a kind of reality that ignores the laws of reason, just like in dreams. I once wrote a story about the Pope visiting a remote Colombian village, something that seemed quite impossible at the time. Well, a few years later the Pope visited Colombia.
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