Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favourite authors. Ever since I read the first page of Love in the Time of Cholera I have been enchanted by his lyrical style which infuses mystical tales with human eccentricities and sex.
One page written by Marquez says more than many authors say
in eight hundred. His writing is like the yummiest richest cheesecake on the
highest shelf of the bakery which you should only devour on special occasions.
I added In Evil Hour
to my collection after discovering it in the basement of a vintage emporium. It
opens up to a rain-soaked country town scarred by the memories of political
upheavals and on the brink of another uprising. Townspeople awake each night to
lampoons nailed outside their doors confirming shameful gossip of affairs and
shoddy business deals involving donkeys.
While rain pelts down on the officials as they try to get to
the bottom of the notices, the putrid smell of a dead cow in the river of the
flooded town corrupts the air. Families wheel their belongings to higher ground
and a circus visits the town.
While I wouldn’t be able to delve deeper into the political
connotations of this novel, I again enjoyed the romance of the writing. The
telegrapher taps out poems of love to a lady telegrapher in another town, the
loud speaker of the overgrown open air cinema bounces of the walls of the
church while the priest flicks through his prohibited movie list and the
clandestine leaflets are found “mimeographed” on both sides.
It is part of Marquez charm that he can instantly transports
you to the climate of a remote hilly Colombian town suffering from a heat-wave.
Falling in line with the messages of the Autumn
of the Patriarch this short novel breathes a hot breath of anger. While he
himself admitted this was not his finest work, the voices of town’s populace is
at times is confusing, it still stands above the finest work of other lesser
authors.
