García Márquez: The Man and His Work by Gene H. Bell-Villada (review)

250Rocky Mountain Review terror, of the vastnesses of their potentiality: Jane Eyre, for example, facing up to what lies in "the depths within" herself, and Pip threatened by the unboundedness that lies "beyond" himself. (In this perilous passage to maturity, as Auerbach acutely notes, it is only the rhetoric, not the experience itself, that is gender-differentiated.) The survivor's "conversion" to adulthood following on the loss of authority figures involves a little death-in-life in which the self is transformed into its own object of belief. Finally, the adult's dying provides the moment of supreme self-possession, life's sole experience of rest and integration. Death scenes in novels—whether of a saintly Mordecai or a demonic Heathcliff—show subjects who "do not quite die" (88) but rather realize themselves completely for the first time and even infuse their spirit into an alter ego who will complete their life work. For Auerbach this notion of death as life's ultimate triumph accounts for some ofthe stranger manifestations of late Victorian art and popular culture, from the doubles and ghouls ofStevenson and Stoker to the vividly self-realized ghosts of Dickens and Collins and the erotic female corpses of Rossetti and Millais. These associations of death images and performance art are among the most intriguing of Auerbach's findings, although at times they crowd her pages so thickly that the connecting links become blurred or even invisible. On the gradual softening of antitheatrical attitudes, for example, it's easy to see how Henry Irving's acting of saints and mystics helped to make "transformations" more respectable, but more difficult to see how it also inspired Stoker's Dracula, or how the spiritual ecstasies and illnesses of such saints as Thérèse of Lisieux and Bernadette of Lourdes somehow expressed "the versatility actresses were forbidden to play" (82). At times, too, readers will miss any acknowledgement of how for some Victorians at least—among them Browning and Dickens—the possibility of multiple selves and role-playing seemed more alluring than fearful. What no reader oíPrivate Theatricals will fail to find, nonetheless, is some unexpected light, shed with diamond-bright clarity, on the workings of the Victorian imagination. MARY ROSE SULLIVAN University of Cotorado at Denver GENE H. BELL-VILLADA. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 247 p. Over the past two decades numerous monographs on Colombia's most famous writer have appeared in several languages. Ofthose published in Spanish and English, Bell-Villada's is the best to date. Divided into two parts ("Background" and "Works") containing a total ofeleven chapters, this study deals in its first part with García Márquez's contributions to the contemporary novel, his native land, his life, his politics, and, in one of the most interesting chapters, his readings. The second part comprises the remaining six chapters treating Cien años de soledad; Los funerales de la Mamá Grande; "Juvenilia and Apprenticeship" (the early short stories and the first three novels); El otoño del patriarca; "The Novelist of Love" (Cándida Erendira and El amor en Book Reviews251 los tiempos del cólera); and "The Legacy" or influence García Márquez has had on younger writers. Although one might question the positioning of "Juvenilia and Apprenticeship" two-thirds of the way into the volume, the organization generally enhances the understanding of the fictional world under scrutiny. Bell-Villada emphasizes Márquez's role as a "people's writer" whose art "springs organically from local values and experiences," just as jazz grows naturally out of Afro-American culture (6). He also views Márquez as an antiacademic and antiestablishment writer in "a nation that is the most solemn in Latin America, one where Bogotá academicians and grammarians have traditionally cast a long shadow over culture" (63). According to the critic, Cien años de soledad helped save the novel from extinction in the 1960s, when the genre was languishing in England, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. In his chapter on Colombia, Bell-Villada highlights not only political and historical events such as la violencia, but also...