HT reviewer Kunal Ray picks his favourite reads of 2021

In a year filled with loss and longing, I read Rodrigo Garcia’s heartwarming account of the last days of his parents, the celebrated writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha. Written with utmost candour, the book represents to me what it means to love with affection without being exhibitionistic. Rodrigo lives in Los Angeles, USA. His parents lived in Mexico. During the last days of his father, a time marked with great turmoil in the life of the writer owing to failing health and memory, Rodrigo had to constantly shuttle between two countries to care for his parents. The book captures the son’s anguish and helplessness in the face of his father’s deteriorating health.

Death and loss, however, are rendered in the most matter of fact way treating their occurrence as commonplace in human life. The son silently saw his father slip away while the world grieved the loss of their favourite writer. Grief is both public and private. But how does one grieve privately and also write about it? Grief, after all, has its own dignity and Garcia’s writing is graceful to say the least. Rodrigo Garcia’s narration takes us inside the family home, their study, bedroom, dining table, the garden which Marquez loved, his favourite chair, the jokes he made, the napping habits of his parents almost revealing the inner world of the writer which very few had access to. To me, the private quarters from which Marquez had crafted his literary adventures are as important.

Marquez was a regular person at home. The book constantly reminds us of the coexistence of the ordinary with the extraordinary in the same individual. It eschews all attempts at mythologizing the life of a celebrated writer. I was especially moved by an episode where Marquez while admitted in the hospital and with a failing memory read his own novels unable to believe that he had written them all. The author image at the end of the book had him perplexed. He began to read the novels all over again in disbelief. And this was a writer for whom memory was his primary tool and raw material. Rodrigo Garcia’s book is a son’s account of his father, a person with vulnerabilities. That’s how Marquez would like to be remembered, I suppose. A man who lived and wrote.

Kunal Ray teaches literary & cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune.