From Brazil first (1958) and from Colombia (1967) later, in just nine years two of the capital works of South American literature were produced. Gabriela, clove y canela, by Brazilian Jorge Amado, on the one hand; One Hundred Years of Soledad, by Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, on the other.
Like a clamp, like the strategy of a liberating army that advanced from different geographies, a literature that condensed the history of these lands, the mythology of these lands, of the culture, customs, spread from Colombia and spread from deep Brazil. forms of love and the labyrinths of politics.
Although they belong to different styles, both works show the masonry work of the peoples of South America. One can see in the pages of these novels how everything grows, how the human hand is eating land from "wild" nature to build the buildings and values ​​of "Progress".
The treatment that sex receives in both works is significant, as if literature had hit the first cries against the itching of the capitals of morality. In the Colombian novel, it seems to me, the theme is more underhanded. Or rather, it is the man who "leads" the woman along the paths of lust and freedom. On the other hand (nine years earlier) in the Brazilian work, the woman, Gabriela, smelling of cloves and with the color of cinnamon, is a wonderful, uninhibited, free and loving beast: or more than that: she is the Edenic woman, the a woman who does not adhere to ethical parameters not because she is rebellious but because she does not know them; But this ignorance is not the child of ignorance but of the most naive and creative freedom.
Gabriela is the New woman, but not new because she has just arrived, but in the sense that Nietzsche gave to the idea: an entity that is beyond good and evil, a supine intelligence, a detachment of all the paraphernalia of human morality: a force that dances and dances, and smiles and enjoys.
I opened the novel as I passed by and I saw it all underlined and I remembered happy reading it, back in 2015; and I always appreciate good books, those that help us think about ourselves and our environments. But above all I am grateful for the incommunicable happiness that the reading of an extraordinary story produces.