Like Joyce, García Márquez gave us a light to follow into the unknown

The greatest writer of our time showed us that a large and generous heart is no impediment to genius, says Peter Carey

Peter Carey

Sometime in the very early 1970s two Australian friends returned from Colombia and asked me to ghostwrite the story of their adventures, which included a conversation with an unknown writer named Gabriel García Márquez. In an effort to overcome my reluctance they lent me an English edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. None of us understood that they had thereby changed my life.

I tried, and failed, to help them memorialise their adventure. Worse, I "forgot" to return the book. Worse still, I arrogantly decided that this novel by this unknown writer would be of far more use to me than it could ever be to them.

I was, at the time I became a thief, stumbling to find a way to escape what Patrick White had called "the dun-coloured realism" of my own country's literature, to make the windswept paddocks on the Geelong Road, say, become luminous and new. The stories worked well enough, but I still wasn't up to the bigger challenge. The absence of placenames in the stories is a good indication of what I was avoiding, a sign that I was still too young (and damaged) to see that Myrniong was a beautiful strange name and that Wonthaggi was a poem unto itself.

It would take 10 years (some 20 stories and a novel) to free myself of this colonial bind, but the first step, without a doubt, was when I opened One Hundred Years of Solitude and read: "At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

Thus Márquez threw open the door I had been so feebly scratching on.

In truth he had done it before that: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

And he would keep on doing it line after line after line. And I was drunk on Márquez. And of course I had no idea what I was reading. I knew nothing of Colombia, let alone Macado. Thus, like the foreign reader of an Australian saga, I was left free to believe that the novelist has personally invented the koala and the platypus.

Even 10 years later, when this lightning strike began to show its effects in my own work, when I could finally celebrate names like Myrniong and Wonthaggi and the attendant miracles and cruelties of my native land, I still did not have a clue about how Márquez's art grew from his own soil. I was like my friend the Australian painter Colin Lancely who loved Miró and finally, in Catalonia, those "original" Miró symbols on every corner.

So, like many of my generation, in a swirl of admiration, I learned from Márquez and was even nourished by my misunderstandings.

It is, of course, unseemly to talk about myself when the greatest writer of our time has died. If I persist it is to make a larger point, that while a writer's greatness can be marked in many ways, it can be objectively measured, across the barriers of translation and oceans, by his or her influence on succeeding generations.

Like Joyce and Eliot, Márquez gave a light to follow into the unknown. He made us braver, he returned us to the path of story and he showed us, thank you Sir, that a large and generous heart is no impediment to genius.

Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/joyce-garcia-marquez-peter-carey