Sometimes I find myself struggling to expand my reading habits to include foreign authors. Because I am from an English-speaking nation, I suppose, my reading habits tend toward American, Irish, and British authors, but even historical records show a slant toward English literature.

Shakespeare dominated the 16^th Century; Milton the 17^th; Samuel Johnson (England) and Jonathan Swift (Ireland) the 18^th. By the 19^th Century, we began to see a little more variety. Charles Dickens of England and Mark Twain of America represented English language, but France made a showing with Flaubert and Victor Hugo, and Russia gave us Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

In the 20^th Century we saw a proliferation of great works from other countries. From America, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck; Virginia Woolf (England), James Joyce (Ireland), Camus (France), Achebe (Nigeria), Kafka (Austria), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbia).

Perhaps it is the improved forms of communication that provides easier access to international authors, along with the existence of major awards organizations like the Booker Prize, International Dublin Literary Award, and the Nobel Prize. But still my reading lags and I have to go all the way back to 2017 to recognize a Nobel author I have read – Japanese-UK author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known here for The Remains of the Day.

Oddly enough, I have read one brief story by Italian author Italo Calvino, who earned considerable attention in Europe in the 1950s-70s. It is a fanciful story titled “Distance to the Moon,” set at a time when the moon came close enough to the earth that it could be reached by ladder. A rag-tag group of characters row out in their cork boat to gather moon-milk, which includes substances the moon has gathered in its orbit—“vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, molds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue.”

Why this story bubbles up in memory I cannot say. Certainly my studies of Russian masterpieces would be more impressive. Or the writings of one of my favorite authors, Columbia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is known for his use of magic realism – a style where the mythical and real co-exist. For example, his short story, “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” is published in many college handbooks, featuring a stranger with tattered gray wings come to earth to reveal the greed of residents in a small seaside town.

Marquez won the Nobel prize in 1982, and is best known for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, that tells the multi-generational story of the fictional Buendia family and their founding of the town of Macondo. Citizens of Marquez’ actual home town of Aracataca have so embraced their native son, that they have enshrined his memory and claimed “Macondo” as theirs.

Among Marquez’ great skills was that of a story teller and my favorite of his novels is Love in the Time of Cholera. Ever the romantic, I was entranced by this fairy tale of long-deferred love, and I suspect will read it again someday. For the impatient, here is a trailer to the movie based on this lovely novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXuxe7dTg2U.

JONNIE MARTIN

(Image courtesy The New York Times)