Storm. It only published the former. Losada’s manuscript reader, the critic and Spanish exile Guillermo de Torre, rejected Leaf Storm because, in his opinion, the Spanish language in this novella was too exotic, along with other flaws. According to the reviewer, these flaws were so obvious that he advised García Márquez to quit writing altogether. This rejection was a major blow for the twenty-four-year-old writer. His group of friends had to convince him that his novella was good, regardless of the gatekeeper’s opinion. “Everyone knows that Spaniards are stupid,” said Cepeda Samudio to his saddened friend. Counterfactually, had not García Márquez received emotional support from friends in Cartagena and Barranquilla, he might have quit fiction and stuck to daily news coverage and the occasional short story published in a newspaper, as he had done until then. But these groups trained him on how to borrow techniques from classic and mainstream contemporary writers. They also moved him away from intellectual short stories by showing him how to connect fiction writing to real-world life experiences. By the time he left the Caribbean, he had a lifetime connection to these collaborators, who were key supporters as he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude.28
The Journalist Succeeds in Bogotá
Back in the country’s capital, García Márquez tried his luck at journalism. He worked for the national newspaper El Espectador. During these years, he had his first major success, but it was as a news reporter, not as a literary writer. In 1955, he published “The Odyssey of the Surviving Shipwrecked Sailor from the A.R.C. Caldas,” a reportage that told the story of a Colombian sailor who survived on a life raft on the open sea for ten days without food and water after his ship capsized in heavy waves in the Caribbean. It ran as a series of installments for fourteen consecutive days. It was “the biggest print run any Colombian newspaper has ever published,” as reported to García Márquez’s biographer Gerald Martin. To imagine this story, he repeated the writing formula that he learned in writing Leaf Storm under the supervision of the Cartagena and Barranquilla Groups. He used as his models an Ancient Greek classic and a successful, contemporary literary work. The first model was Homer’s Odyssey, and the second was Hemingway’s realist novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which he read in the magazine Life en Español in 1953 translated into Latin American Spanish. By writing with such a formula, García Márquez turned what was supposed to be a simple reportage of a shipwrecked sailor into a literary experiment. It is worth noting that José Salgar, the newspaper editor who assigned García Márquez the story, claimed that he had “more brilliant and more skillful journalists” to write it. After the success of that story, García Márquez received an offer to publish his first book and moved away from daily news coverage to writing journalistic series (series periodísticas). In these series, García Márquez continued to combine fact reporting with a literary style. Since he could not find a publisher for his new fiction writing, these series were key to his professional growth. Between 1955 and 1959, they were also his only means of literary expression (more on this below).29
While he improved his skills as a reporter, García Márquez learned another set of skills from writing film reviews. As a film critic for El Espectador, every week he reviewed an average of three movies released in Bogotá. He worked as a critic for about a year and reviewed all kinds of films, from Hollywood and Disney blockbusters to Latin American films and European independent movies. Film reviewing helped him to think about character construction, storytelling, editing, and other technical aspects that he commented on repeatedly.
He developed a special taste for films of Italian neorealism. After World War II, it was one of the most influential trends in cinema. He was attracted to the ways in which neorealism portrayed the lives of the working class and ordinary people facing dire situations as well as magical events. He wrote enthusiastic reviews of the now classic neorealist films Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D., among others. About Bicycle Thieves, he concluded, it is “the most humane film ever made.” About Miracle in Milan, he wrote a long and detailed review rather than his customary review of three films in one piece. He was fascinated by its seamless combination of fantasy and reality. As he put it, this movie “is quite a fairy tale, but set in an unusual environment, and it mixed, in a real manner, the fantastic and the real, to the point that in many cases it is not possible to know where the one ends and where the other begins.” At several points in this review, he also pointed out specific examples of how the film made it possible for viewers to believe that the most fantastic of events were completely normal for the characters. And about Umberto D., he wrote, “Its greatness lies in the fidelity with which it resembles life. [Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini] have shown the tremendous pathos present in the simple act of going to bed.”30
Thanks to his writing as a film critic, García Márquez learned about the conventions of cinematic language and storytelling, conventions that enriched his literary imagination. And thanks to his writing on neorealist cinema in particular, he nurtured a sensibility for fantastic events happening in ordinary, daily situations. This mixture of magic and reality was crucial to the imagination he needed in order to write One Hundred Years of Solitude and became the basis of his own magical realist style.
Although García Márquez could not find publishers for his work, he started to win literary awards. In 1954, he won a short story contest organized by the National Association of Writers and Artists of Colombia. He wrote the award-winning story “One Day after Saturday” in 1953 and it came out the following year in Magazín Dominical, the Sunday literary supplement of El Espectador, which had published several of his short stories. “One Day after Saturday” tells the story of a half-crazy priest who helps a poor young man leave the village. In this story, Macondo appears for the first time in his writing. But with a crucial difference: Macondo is not yet the name of a village but of a hotel. Central characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude participate in the story, especially the widow Rebeca, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his brother José Arcadio Buendía are mentioned. Several characters feel solitude (the overarching theme in his future novel) and live in an area of constant heat. In addition, unusual and fantastic events that appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude are first narrated in the story, such as the unexplainable death of dozens of birds, the scary presence of the Wandering Jew, and the strong smell of gunpowder on the corpse of Arcadio Buendía. After the award, this story was included in Tres cuentos colombianos (Three Colombian Short Stories), a book featuring this short story and those of the two runners-up, Guillermo Ruiz Rivas and Carlos Arturo Truque. In the Introduction, the members of the award committee said that García Márquez’s “style suits the game of his imagination.”31 With this statement, the committee wanted to praise him for incorporating in Colombian literature some recent trends in contemporary fiction. The other two writers were closer to the traditional costumbrista style. Yet this book, unlike his reportage of the sailor, attracted little interest.
His novella Leaf Storm attracted a bit more interest. Some critics praised what members of the award committee liked about his short story: for the first time, a work of Colombian literature applied the writing techniques and themes present in Faulkner’s novels. Critic Alonso Ángel Restrepo wrote, “Leaf Storm will divide the history of our national novel into two stages: the one before this work and the one that will follow.” Other critics believed the opposite. An anonymous reviewer criticized it harshly. For him, it reflected the poor state of national literature: “prizes have been given to vulgar and despicable books such as one entitled Leaf Storm in which words repeat again and again in each chapter because of the shortage of materials. . . . It is not fair that this shitty novella is qualified as the last word.” And, regarding its contents, critics saw the novella as a rural, local story from the country’s backward banana region. In reality, the book had little impact beyond art circles in Bogotá. Poor distribution, not surprisingly, did not help. The publication and trajectory of the novella was typical for the average literary book produced in Latin America before the publishing boom of the 1960s. Ediciones S.L.B., the small publisher in Bogotá that released Leaf Storm, disappeared shortly after its creation. By contract, S.L.B. agreed to publish four thousand copies. Most likely, it ended
