Shall we dance?

García Márquez felt that One Hundred Years of Solitude was a literary risk of a particular kind. ‘Listen to this’, he told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. ‘When a character in the book shoots himself, his blood trickles in a thin stream all round the town until it finds the dead man's mother. The whole book is like that, on a knife's edge between the sublime and the vulgar. Like the bolero.’ We may note incidentally that with ‘shoots himself’ García Márquez seems to solve the mystery the novel so fastidiously leaves unsolved. But he is only the author.

A bolero is a Latin American dance tune, smoother and softer than a rhumba. The lyric typically concerns loneliness and unhappy love, destiny and ill luck; asks time to stop, talks to stars and nightingales; says you will always be in my heart. The form ‘may seem excessively sentimental’, Apuleyo Mendoza says, ‘but it is also tongue-in-cheek’. The form is sentimental, but that is its virtue. What García Márquez wanted was the hyperbolic licence of the popular song, and in this sense the extravagance of the bolero is the exact complement of his deadpan tone. The wildest songs are the ones you have to sing straight. For an analogy we may think of the lurid gothic fables that crop up in country and western music – hearts, for example, left in jars by the door – and indeed in many straightforward ballads.