Prescriptions for Good English Writing - 3

 

The great importance of parallel
construction in presenting ideas

By Jose A. Carillo

Part IV – Presenting ideas in parallel

We saw in the first three parts of this essay that the consistent use of parallel structures is the key to more readable, more forceful, and more polished sentences. We also learned that for clearer and more cohesive sentences, we should always use parallel structures when presenting various elements in a list, when comparing elements, when joining elements with a linking verb or a verb or being, and when joining elements with correlative conjunctions.

                                              IMAGE CREDIT: TEACHERSPAYTEACHERS.COM

Before winding up our discussions on parallel construction, we will take up two more techniques for harnessing parallelism to give structural balance and better rhythm to our sentences. We will discover that these techniques can dramatically improve our writing and give it a distinctive sense of style.

Use parallel structure for adjectives and adverbs. We should also aim for parallel patterns when using adjectives and adverbs in our sentences, seeking structural balance for them in much the same way as we do for noun forms, verb forms, infinitives, and gerunds.

Unparallel construction: “She danced gracefully, with confidence and as if exerting no effort at all.”

Here, we have a stilted sentence because the modifiers of the verb “danced” have taken different grammatical forms: “gracefully” (adverb), “with confidence” (adjective introduced by a preposition), and “as if exerting no effort at all” (adverbial phrase).

Parallel construction: “She danced gracefully, confidently, effortlessly.” The consistent adverb/adverb/adverb pattern gives the sentence a strong sense of unity and drama.

Unparallel construction: “The gang attempted an audacious bank robbery that was marked by lightning speed and done in a commando manner.” The sentence reads badly because the three modifiers of “bank robbery” are grammatically different: “audacious” (adjective), “marked by lightning speed” (participial phrase), and “done in a commando manner” (another participial phrase).

Parallel construction: “The gang attempted an audacious, lightning-swift, commando-type bank robbery.” The sentence reads much more forcefully because of its consistent adjective-adjective-adjective pattern for all of the modifiers of “bank robbery.”

Use parallel structure for several elements serving as complements of a sentence. For more cohesive and forceful sentences, we should always look for a suitable common pattern for their complements. Recall that a complement is an added word or expression that completes the predicate of a sentence. For instance, in the sentence “They included Albert in their soccer lineup,” the phrase “in their soccer lineup” is the complement.

Unparallel construction: “We basked in the kindness of our gracious hosts, walking leisurely in the benign morning sunshine, and the palm trees would rustle pleasantly when we napped in the lazy afternoons.” Here, we have a confusing construction because the three elements serving as complements don’t have a common grammatical pattern: “the kindness of our hosts” (noun phrase), “walking leisurely in the benign morning sunshine” (progressive verb form), and “the palm trees would rustle pleasantly when we napped in the lazy afternoons” (clause).

Parallel construction: “We basked in the kindness of our gracious hosts, in the benign sunshine during our early morning walks, and in the pleasant rustle of the palm trees when we napped in the lazy afternoons.” The sentence reads much, much better this time because the three complements are now all noun phrases in parallel—“in the kindness of our gracious hosts,” “in the benign morning sunshine during our early morning walks,” and “in the pleasant rustle of the palm trees when we napped in the lazy afternoons.” Note that all three have been made to work as adverbial phrase modifiers of the verb “basked.”

In actual writing, of course, the need to use parallel structures in our sentences will not always be apparent at first. As we develop our compositions, however, we should always look for opportunities for parallel construction, choose the most suitable grammatical pattern for them, then pursue that pattern consistently. Together with good grammar, this is actually the great secret to good writing that many of us have been looking for all along.

Part V – Presenting ideas in parallel

Pursuing Parallelism Beyond the Sentence Level

In the earlier parts of this series, we reviewed the various ways of achieving parallelism when constructing sentences. We saw how using the same function words can match and balance the clauses and phrases in a compound sentence, and how presenting our ideas in parallel not only emphasizes that they are equally important but also clarifies the point that we are making about them. This time, we will see how parallelism can be pursued beyond the sentence level to make our writing clearer and more forceful, and our language more elegant and pleasing to the ears. 

We must not wrongly assume, of course, that we should aim for parallelism only for such elaborate pieces as expository writing or speeches. We need parallel structures even for such mundane requirements as tables of contents and résumé listings. In the sample table of contents below, for instance, note the meticulous parallelism in the consistent use of noun phrases for the headings in the first level, gerunds for the headings in the second, and simple nouns in the third. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Our Uses and Misuses of English [noun phrase]

        A.  Mastering the Parts of Speech [gerund phrase]

    1. Nouns [noun]

    2. Pronouns [noun]

    3. Verbs [noun]

    4. Adjectives [noun]

    5. Adverbs [noun]

    6. Prepositions [noun]

    7. Conjunctions [noun]

    8. Determiners [noun]

       B.   Grappling with the Language [gerund phrase]

             1. Academese [noun]

             2. Legalese [noun]

             3. Gobbledygook [noun]

             4. Clichés [noun]

II. Our Grasp of English Usage and Style [noun phrase]

        A.  Constructing Sentences [gerund phrase]

             1.Structure [noun]

             2. Logic [noun] 

       B.  Acquiring Style [gerund phrase]

             1.  Form [noun]

             2. Technique [noun]

III. Our Familiarity with the English Idioms [noun phrase]

When a table of contents is organized along such parallel lines, readers can follow the logic and flow of our ideas much more easily—even if those ideas aren’t expressed in complete sentences. 

Now, let’s see how parallel structures can likewise make our résumés clearer and more persuasive. Below, under “Work Experience,” note that the titles for skills are consistently stated as gerunds, and those for work descriptions as verb phrases:

WORK EXPERIENCE

1.  Writing and Editing: [gerunds] 

     • Produced news and feature stories for the company magazine [verb phrase] 

     • Researched and drafted speeches for the CEO [verb phrase; not, say, “Researching and drafting            speeches for the CEO,” which are gerund phrases] 

     • Developed scripts for special occasions and organized events [verb phrase; not, say, “Scripts for            special company occasions and organized events,” which is a noun phrase]

2.  Coordinating Events: [gerund] 

     • Acted as company spokesman for the mass media [verb phrase, consistent with the first item                  under “Writing and Editing”]

 • Represented the company in major public forums [verb phrase; not, say, “Company
        representative in major forums,” which is a noun phrase]  

Parallelism as a tool for achieving clarity and for evoking feeling in exposition

Given its effectiveness in focusing ideas and in giving symmetry to language, it also shouldn’t be surprising that parallelism is a very powerful tool for achieving clarity and for evoking feeling in expository prose. Feel the elegant sweep and quiet tug of emotion in this passage from “The Night Country” by the American literary naturalist Loren Eiseley: 

“In some of us a child—lost, strayed off the beaten path—goes wandering to the end of time while we, in another garb, grow up, marry or seduce, have children, hold jobs, or sit in movies, and refuse to answer our mail. Or, by contrast, we haunt our mailboxes, impelled by some strange anticipation of a message that will never come."  

Even more consummate in pursuing parallelism was the English historian Edward Gibbon. Take a look at this superb passage from his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: 

“There are two very natural propensities [that] we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action. If the former is refined by art and learning, improved by the charms of social intercourse, and corrected by a just regard to economy, to health, and to reputation, it is productive of the greatest part of the happiness of private life. The love of action is a principle of a much stronger and more doubtful nature. It often leads to anger, to ambition, and to revenge; but when it is guided by the sense of propriety and benevolence, it becomes the parent of every virtue, and, if those virtues are accompanied with equal abilities, a family, a state, or an empire may be indebted for their safety and prosperity to the undaunted courage of a single man. To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonized would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.”   

Having seen the many wonders that parallelism can do, we now have every reason to pursue it more vigorously in our own writing.

[END OF SERIES ON PARALLELISM]

Prescriptions for Good English Writing - 2

The great importance of parallel
construction in presenting ideas

By Jose A. Carillo

Part III – Presenting ideas in parallel

We have already taken up the two basic rules for parallel construction, namely that a sentence that presents two or more serial elements should stick to the same pattern all throughout, and that a parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. We saw that we can build much clearer and more forceful sentences by consistently observing these rules.

Now we need to refamiliarize ourselves with four specific applications of these two parallelism rules: (1) that all of the elements being enumerated in a list should take the same grammatical form, (2) that elements being compared should take the same grammatical form, (3) that elements joined by a linking verb or a verb of being should take the same grammatical form, and (4) that elements joined by a correlative conjunction should take the same grammatical form.

                                                IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDEPLAYER.COM

All elements in a list should have a parallel structure. We can make our written compositions better organized and more readable by using the same grammatical form for all the elements we are enumerating in a list. The elements should all be noun forms, verb forms, infinitive phrases, gerund phrases, or participial phrases, whichever is most appropriate. When we allow any of the elements to take a different form, the rhythm of the enumeration is broken and the reader’s train of thought is needlessly disrupted.

Consider the following not-so-well-thought-out list:

“At present, our club has: (1) no formal charter, (2) subsisting without a long-term organizational goal, (3) a seriously declining membership, (4) a large budgetary deficit, and (5) to collect a large amount of past-due membership fees.”

The list looks awfully craggy and reads very badly for an obvious reason: its elements don’t follow a consistent grammatical form. Items 1, 3, and 4 are noun phrases, but Item 2 is a verb phrase in the progressive form and Item 5 is an infinitive phrase.

Now see how smoothly and cohesively the list reads when its elements all take the same grammatical form, in this case as verb phrases:

“At present, our club: (1) lacks a formal charter, (2) subsists without a long-term organizational goal, (3) suffers from a seriously declining membership, (4) carries a large budgetary deficit, and (5) needs to collect a large amount of past-due membership fees”.

Elements being compared should use a parallel structure. In constructions that use the form “X is better than/more than Y,” we have to make sure that the elements being compared have the same grammatical structure. Unparallel (gerund/infinitive): “She enjoys jogging better than to run.” Parallel (gerund/gerund): “She enjoys jogging better than running.”

Elements joined by a linking verb or a verb of being should use a parallel structure. When we use “is” as a verb of being that links two elements, we have to make sure that the elements have the same grammatical structure. Unparallel (infinitive/gerund): “To make that impossible demand is declaring open hostilities.” Parallel (infinitive/infinitive): “To make that impossible demand is to declare open hostilities.”

Elements joined by a correlative conjunction should use a parallel structure. When we use the correlative conjunctions “either . . .  or,” “neither . . . nor,” “not only . . . but also,” “both . . . and . . .”, and “whether . . . or,” we have to make sure that the elements being correlated have the same grammatical structure.

Unparallel (gerund/infinitive): “For you to get to Manila on time, we suggest either taking the morning flight tomorrow or to drive overnight right now.” Parallel (gerund/gerund): “For you to get to Manila on time, we suggest either taking the morning flight tomorrow or driving overnight right now.”

Unparallel: “They not only demand very short installment periods but also huge down payments.” Parallel: “They demand not only very short installment periods but also huge down payments.” Also parallel: “They not only demand very short installment periods but also demand huge down payments.”

We will take up some more fine points about parallelism in Part IV of this essay.

Next: Part IV – Presenting ideas in parallel
June 29, 2023 (Thursday)

Prescriptions for Good English Writing

The great importance of parallel
construction in presenting ideas

By Jose A. Carillo

Apart from the usefulness of the information or the power of the ideas being presented, what distinguishes good writing from insipid, so-so writing is parallelism in grammar along with symmetry in sentence construction. Parallelism and symmetry are actually mutually reinforcing attributes of exposition; by emphasizing the likeness or similarity between two or more ideas at both the sentence and paragraph levels, they promote clarity of expression and make the language more forceful and readable.

But precisely how do we achieve parallelism and symmetry in our own writing?

To shed some light to this question, I wrote a four-part essay, “Presenting ideas in parallel,” for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2006. Part I took up the basic rule for parallel construction: never mix grammatical forms when presenting similar or related ideas. Part II discussed another very important parallel construction rule: a parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. Part III presented specific applications of the two parallelism rules taken up in Parts I and II. Finally, Part IV demonstrated how to achieve structural balance for sentences by using parallel structure for adjectives and adverbs as well as for two or more grammatical elements serving as complements.

That four-part essay now forms part of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge (Manila Times Publishing, © 2010, 486 pages). Having seen not just a few violations (and apparent misunderstanding) of the parallelism rule in media on several occasions, however, I decided to post all parts of the essay in full in this blogspot. I am confident that by taking to heart that essay’s prescriptions for achieving parallelism, Forum members and friends (and the occasional media writers who drop by at the Forum) will see a dramatic improvement in both their written and spoken English. 

Part I – Presenting ideas in parallel

Parallel construction is one of our most powerful tools for organizing and presenting ideas. It cannot be overemphasized that making our sentences grammatically and semantically correct is simply not enough. We should also ensure that each of their grammatical structures that are alike in function follows the same pattern. In fact, observance of this basic stylistic rule very often spells the difference between good and bad writing.

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To give us a better idea of the power of parallel construction, let us first examine the following simple sentence: “Alberto likes reading, jogging, and to play computer games.”

We will find that it is structurally disjointed and does not read well because not all of its serial elements follow the same pattern. Although the first two elements, “reading” and “jogging,” are in parallel because both are gerunds (“-ing” noun forms), the third, “to play computer games,” ruins the parallelism because it is in the infinitive form (“to” + the verb stem).

One quick way to fix this structural problem is to put the third element also in gerund form, “playing computer games,” so that the sentence reads as follows: “Alberto likes reading, jogging, and playing computer games.” It is now grammatical balanced and no longer sounds stilted.

Another way for the original sentence to achieve parallelism is to make all three of its serial elements take the infinitive form: “Alberto likes to read, to jog, and to play computer games.” This sentence, of course, can be streamlined even further by using “to” only once right before the first of the all-infinitive parallel elements: “Alberto likes to read, jog, and play computer games.”

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In actual practice, we have to put in parallel not only single words or short phrases but much more complicated grammatical structures such as extended phrases and clauses as well as long serial lists. However, the basic rule for parallel construction remains the same: never mix grammatical forms. We have to choose the most appropriate form for the similar or related ideas, then stick to the same pattern all the way.

Consider the following sentence with three extended elements that are not all in parallel:

“The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time, approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very bad.”

The first subordinate clause, “he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time,” is in parallel with the second subordinate clause, “(he) approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors,” because both of them are active verb forms using “he” (the advertising manager) as the subject. However, the third subordinate clause, “his human relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very poor,” disrupts the parallelism because it is in the passive verb form and takes for its subject not “he” but another noun form, “his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”

See how much better the sentence reads when the third element is modified so it becomes parallel with the first two:

“The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time, allowed the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and related very badly with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”

Note that the three elements are now all active-voice verb phrases—“rarely managed…”, “allowed the publication…”, and “related very badly…”—that are perfectly parallel in form.

We will go deeper into the various ways of achieving parallelism in Part II of this essay.

Part II – Presenting ideas in parallel

As emphasized in Part I of this essay, the basic rule for parallel construction is to never mix grammatical forms when presenting similar or related ideas. A sentence that presents two or more serial elements should stick to the same pattern all throughout—all noun forms, all gerund forms, all infinitive forms, or all verb forms as the case may be. When serial elements all take the same form, ideas come across much more clearly and cohesively.

At this point, we will discuss another very important parallel construction rule: A parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. Recall now that a clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a predicate (and can thus function as a sentence in its own right, as in “we should obey the law”), as opposed to a phrase, which is a group of words that doesn’t have them (and thus can’t function as a sentence by itself, as in “to obey the law” or “obeying the law”). When the sentence doesn’t sustain the clause pattern, or when any of the clauses shifts from the active to the passive voice or the other way around, the parallelism falls apart. The result is a disjointed sentence that doesn’t read well.

Take this sentence that contains three serial grammatical elements:

“The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, that they should always do their assigned homework, and to submit their term papers on time.”

The parallelism of this sentence breaks down because while the first two elements—“they should aim for perfect attendance” and “they should always do their assigned homework”—are both clauses, the third element—“to submit their term papers on time”—is not a clause but an infinitive phrase.

We need to make this third element also a clause—“they should submit their term papers on time”—so the sentence can become perfectly parallel and more readable:

“The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, that they should do their assigned homework regularly, and that they should submit their term papers on time.”

Of course, a more concise but less emphatic way to construct this serial-clause sentence is to use the imperative “that they should” only once before the first clause:

“The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, do their assigned homework regularly, and submit their term papers on time.”

(Be forewarned, though, that such streamlining can obscure the meaning in more complicated constructions.)

The parallel structure of a sentence with serial clauses can also be ruined when any of the clauses takes a different voice, say the passive from active:

“The president anticipated that majority of the lower house would welcome the planned Charter change, that most of the senators would fiercely oppose it, and that a vicious demolition job would be mounted against it by her political detractors.”

Here, the first two clauses—“majority of the lower house would welcome the planned charter change” and “most of the senators would fiercely oppose it”—are in the active voice, but the third clause—“a vicious demolition job would be mounted against it by her political detractors”—is in the passive voice, thus disrupting the pattern.

To make the construction parallel all throughout, we should make the third clause also take the active voice—“her political detractors would mount a vicious demolition job against it.” This results in a more forceful sentence:

“The president anticipated that majority of the lower house would welcome the planned charter change, that most of the senators would fiercely oppose it, and that her political detractors would mount a vicious demolition job against it.”

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 29 and June 5, 2006 © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Next: Part III – Presenting ideas in parallel

June 26, 2023 (Monday)

The Mainsprings of Human Knowledge

The Tree of Life and Wisdom
By Jose A. Carillo

I have given it a lot of thought, and now I suspect that the original Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was not a living plant but a powerful computer. The Bible was surprisingly silent about the nature of that tree, so artists and writers through the ages had felt free to variously picture it as an apple tree, a fig tree, a pear tree, a dragon’s blood tree, even a banana tree. I understand that in a 13th century cathedral somewhere in France, there was even a fresco that showed Eve finding a serpent coiled around a giant branching European mushroom, the lightly toxic and hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, drawn with Provencãl innocence to represent the tree that gave us our much-dreaded mortality. These images of the Tree of Knowledge are as charming as the Romans envisioning their messenger-god Mercury as a runner with winged feet, as frightening as the early Christians sketching the devil as a thoroughly beastly creature with serpent’s snout and bat wings, and as heavenly as the Renaissance artists conjuring archangels with majestic, blindingly white eagle’s wings.

All of this ancient imagery, however, miserably fails to capture the essence of a device or icon that is supposed to represent the most powerful source of wisdom and instruction the world has ever known. An apple tree, a banana tree, or a vine-like mushroom as the Tree of Knowledge? This seems to me to stretch the credulity of even a nine-year-old grade-schooler much too much! I would therefore rather think of the Tree of Knowledge as a Pentium 4 personal computer with a 56 kbps fax modem, hooked up by a powerful Internet server to the World Wide Web, capable of directly feeding on the 2.5 billion documents accessible to the Internet and of being able to sift through 520 billion more that are publicly accessible in other databases.* I could not think of any other compendium or structure, no matter how massive, that could draw on such a huge database and merit “Tree of Knowledge” as a sobriquet, much less make this database accessible to even the small populace of the Garden of Eden close to the time of Creation.

Of course I realize that a myriad conceptual objections can be raised against this seemingly whimsical intellectual construct. Chief of these is the question of how the Pentium 4 and the Internet could have gotten themselves into the Garden of Eden in the first place. Could it be that they had managed to quietly transport themselves back in time and install themselves into the Tree of Knowledge, or else disguise themselves as the tree itself? Those fixated with time’s immutability would of course deem this too farfetched, as improbable as the tales of extraterrestrial visitations peddled by the Danish writer Erik von Daeniken. But it is at least not as preposterous a concept as a fruit tree being the source of all human understanding and wisdom. A tree as a source of life, yes, like our coconut with its proverbial one thousand and one uses, from food to shelter to medicine to fuel and to lumber; but just any tree as source of all knowledge, I really wonder.

And what about the paradox that would result if we believed that the Tree of Knowledge drew its power from a state-of-the-art Pentium? Would that belief still hold if we consider the fact that the computer and the Web are actually the culmination of the series of small and big inventions that sprung from Adam and Eve having eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge itself? Remember that the computer became possible only because somewhere early in time, man discovered and learned how to harness fire, then found a way centuries later to use it to melt the tiny particles of glass in sand into wafers of silicon, then developed a method for converting these wafers into transistor chips and into extremely powerful motherboards and processors that are the heart of the modern computer. Remember, too, that the Internet and the Web are of a much more recent vintage. It was only in 1973 that the Internet came into being, the happy result of American research into technologies to interlink computer networks of various kinds. Another 21 years into the future, in 1994, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to unify and integrate the Internet’s global information and communication structure. Since then it has expanded into a global network of networks, enabling computers of all kinds—including yours and mine—to directly communicate and share services throughout much of our planet.

What is perhaps little appreciated in this dizzying train of inventions is that the modern computer and the Web have been essentially a continuing but silent Hindu-Arabic-European-American co-production, and that at the root of it was the ancient Indo-European language and the Arabic number system. We know, of course, that these twin foundations of our civilization moved into Europe and jumped across the English Channel into England, polishing themselves into the English language and into the Arabic number system that we know so well today. It really is no wonder that Boolean algebra, a mathematical system of representing logical propositions that became the foundation for the modern computer, was developed by the English language expert and mathematician George Boole in the very same soil that produced the wonder of English literature that was William Shakespeare. The Chinese may have invented paper, the abacus, and gunpowder, and the Romans may have built their empire that extended all the way to Africa and to the banks of the Mesopotamian River in what is now modern Iraq, but I simply cannot conceive of the modern computer built from Chinese script or from the Roman numeral system, with which no stable building taller than the Roman Coliseum could be built because the system simply could not multiply and divide numbers properly.

That the Tree of Knowledge could not have been a fruit tree but a computer linked to the Web may remain debatable, and I will not quibble with that fact. But to me, one thing is clear and certain: the computer and the Worldwide Web have made the Tree of Knowledge much more accessible and closer to us than ever before, and it would be a tragedy if not outright foolish for anyone not to learn to freely partake of its fruits. (2002)

From English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*After this essay was written, of course, the Pentium 4 processor had since been supplanted in personal computers by much more advanced and powerful processors like the Core-Duo, and Google has grown even more explosively from 2,469,940,685 web pages in 2002 to over 30,000,000,000 today. It can thus be said that the computing machines and the online search engine capability that I had described glowingly in this 2002 essay are now obsolete. (2009)

Personal Tribute to a Nobel Prize Literary Laureate

How I Discovered Gabriel García Márquez
By Jose A. Carillo

It is a very private story that I occasionally tell, but only to aspiring literary types, younger executives, and teenage bookworms who find time to ask me what is a good English-language book or novel to read. The story is about how, many years ago, I discovered Gabriel García Márquez in the romance section of a big bookstore at Claro M. Recto Avenue in Manila. It was shortly before or right after martial law had taken the life of the daily paper where I was working as a roving reporter, I cannot remember the exact date now. But there was Márquez, still a total stranger to me, in the Avon hardback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad in the original Spanish), enjoying in the same shelf the company of such rupture-and-heartbreak novelists as Emily Loring, Barbara Cartland, and Jacqueline Susann. No, García Márquez did not get there as an occasional stray, chucked absentmindedly or insensitively into the shelf by some browser. If memory serves me well, the book had been actually misclassified and miscatalogued in the same genre as the more popular company it was keeping when I found it.

The reason why it got there was probably serendipity of the most sublime order, but I think you can dismiss that thought as just me imagining the whole thing in chronological reverse. A more plausible reason was that it had the green and grainy cover art of a naked man and woman in passionate embrace, which I later thought was the publisher’s well-intentioned attempt to make the Buendia family’s otherwise unimaginable tragedies and grief more commercially acceptable. It was actually this somber study in solarized chiaroscuro that drew my eye to the book. When I began to leaf through it, however, furtively expecting some passages about women in the throes of illicit sex, I read something much more exciting, much more stimulating, and much more intriguing. “Many years later,” García Márquez began, “as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” A few passages later I was irretrievably sold to the book. I promptly paid for it, tearing the plastic wrapping no sooner had the sales clerk sealed it, and started to read as I trudged the sidewalk on my way to my apartment somewhere in the city.

When I had read the book twice or thrice and still couldn’t get over the thrill of the discovery, I excitedly recommended and lent it to a broadcast acquaintance at the old National Press Club. I can’t remember now who the borrower was, but he was one of those press club habitues who would dawdle over beer or gin tonic at the bar till somebody’s self-imposed midnight closing song-and-piano piece was over. What I do remember is that he never returned it to me. He assured me, however, that he had read it and enjoyed it so much that he could not resist lending it to someone—was it Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil or the late Renato Constantino?—who in turn lent it to someone who lent it to someone until finally the chain in the lending was lost. The last I heard from the original borrower was that the book had been passed on to an English Lit. professor at the University of the Philippines, where a few years later I was to learn that it had become mandatory reading in its English graduate school.

Being pathetically inept in Spanish, I could never really know what Castilian or Colombian idioms I missed in the English translation, but the English-language García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude truly set my mind on fire. He lit in me a tiny flame at first, then a silent fire for language that burned even brighter with the passing of the years. He was not only robust and masterful in his prose but devastatingly penetrating in his insights about the flow and ebb of life in the archetypal South American town of Macondo. Not since I chanced upon a battered copy of The Leopard (Il Gatopardo in the original Italian) by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa two years earlier, this time a real stray in a smaller bookstore nearby, had I seen such soaring yet quietly majestic writing. Here is García Márquez at his surreal best: “Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats as she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant when Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identity the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the sheets of the flapping sheets that rose up with her…” With prose like this I became a García Márquez pilgrim, re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude countless times and devouring, like an adolescent glutton, practically all of his novels and short-story collections in the years that followed.

Many years later, in 1982, I was to discover in the morning papers that García Márquez had so deservedly won the Nobel Prize for literature. I was so happy for the new Nobel Laureate and for myself, and I no longer thought anymore of ever recovering that first copy of him that I had the pleasure of retrieving from the company where it obviously didn’t belong. In homage I went back to the bookstore where I first found García Márquez, quietly and almost reverently picking up a new Picador paperback edition of him. Its cover art was no longer the man and woman in the deathless embrace, but this time an image more faithful to the elemental truth of the book: the whole Buendia family in a portrait of domestic but elegiac simplicity, at one and at peace with the chickens and shrubs and flowers that gave them sustenance, awaiting the last of the one hundred years allotted to them on earth.

The book is mottled with age and yellow with paper acid now. Now and then I would lend it to a soul that is intrigued why I would keep such a forlorn book on my office desk, but only after tragicomically extracting an elaborate pledge that he or she would really read it and give it back to me no matter how long it took to finish it.
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This essay originally appeared in the author’s “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently became Chapter 40, Section 7 of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. Copyright 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The essay likewise appeared as a CNN iReport feature in memory of Gabriel García Márquez's death on April 17, 2014. He was 87.

Read my personal tribute to to the late Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez in Jose Carillo's English Forum on Apri 18, 2014.  https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6200.0