While looking on the AP's app, I saw an article that said a book of Marquez's journalistic wok will be published in May. It will be called El Escandalo del Siglo or The Scandal of the Century in English. The novel will cover over 35 years of his time as a journalist, from around the 1950s to the 1980s. In reading an interview conducted by The Paris Review, Reporter Peter H. Stone interviewed Marquez about his time as a journalist. The interview was done in 1981, just around the time the new book will end.
When asked the question if novels can do something journalism cannot, Marquez gave a very interesting answer, “Nothing. I don’t think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.” This is interesting because I never thought of those two writing styles in that was. If you want to write a novel on Vietnam, for example, you would do research and find information just like a journalist would.
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1 comment:
It is rare that an artist stands the test of time. In school, we pretty much read the few exceptions, the writers that will be remembered for decades if not centuries. Marquez is a relatively new author in the grand scheme of things. He just recently died in 2014. However, people from all over the world are continuing to read and review his works of art. It makes me wonder if this will continue for decades to come.
An interesting question one might ask is what makes a book or a painting so memorable. What makes that particular work of art stand the test of time? Is it the controversial topics discussed in the books, is it the critique of a society? Or did the artist just happen to be in the right place at the right time? Or is it all of the previous?
We already know that Marquez has critiqued the Colombian way of life, and the history behind the nation. But what makes him different from all the other authors who have done the same. Just a couple questions to think about on your Saturday night.
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