My child­hood dis­cov­ery of Edward Gorey proved rev­e­la­to­ry. I rec­og­nized my own bewil­der­ment in the blank expres­sions of his obses­sive­ly-ren­dered Edwar­dian chil­dren. His char­ac­ters, impris­oned in starched col­lars and stays, stared at the world through hol­low eyes, struck dumb by alter­nat­ing cur­rents of absur­di­ty and hor­ror. Every young­ster with bud­ding goth and New Roman­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties found them­selves drawn into Gorey’s weird worlds. Con­fessed Goreyphiles like Tim Bur­ton and Neil Gaiman took much from a style Steven Kurutz describes as “camp-macabre, iron­ic-goth­ic or dark whim­sy.”

He gave his read­ers per­mis­sion to be odd and haunt­ed, and to laugh about it, but he nev­er seemed to have need­ed such per­mis­sion him­self. He was as sui gener­is as he was mys­te­ri­ous, the scowl­ing old­er gen­tle­man with the long white beard assumed the role of an anti-San­ta, bestow­ing gifts of guilt-free, soli­tary indul­gence in dark fan­ta­sy.

But the man him­self remained shroud­ed, and that was just as well. Learn­ing more about him as an adult, I have been struck by just how close­ly he resem­bles some of his char­ac­ters, or rather, by how much he was, in work and life, entire­ly him­self.

A fash­ion­ably book­ish her­mit and Wildean aes­thete, a man to whom, “by his own admis­sion… noth­ing hap­pened,” Gorey orga­nized his life in New York around read­ing, see­ing films, and attend­ing George Balanchine’s bal­lets. (He rarely missed a per­for­mance over the course of three decades, then moved to his famed Cape Cod house when Bal­an­chine died in the mid-80s.) “Despite being a life­long Anglophile, he made just one brief vis­it to Scot­land and Eng­land,” writes Kurutz, “his only trip abroad.”

In a Proust Ques­tion­naire he answered for Van­i­ty Fair, Gorey wrote that his favorite jour­ney was “look­ing out the win­dow.” The supreme love of his life, he wrote: his cats. Those beloved crea­tures are the sub­ject of the third episode of Goreytelling, at the top, an ani­mat­ed web series con­sist­ing of short excerpts from an upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary sim­ply titled Gorey, direct­ed by Christo­pher Seufert, who spent sev­er­al years record­ing his con­ver­sa­tions with Gorey. The very Gorey-like ani­ma­tions are by Ben­jamin and Jim Wick­ey.

If you’ve ever won­dered what Edward Gorey sound­ed like, won­der no more. Hear his solid­ly Mid­west­ern accent (Gorey grew up in Chica­go) as he describes the tra­vails of liv­ing with adorable, frus­trat­ed preda­tors who destroy the fur­ni­ture and throw them­selves on his draw­ing table, ruin­ing his work. Fur­ther up, he tells the sto­ry of a mummy’s head he kept wrapped up in his clos­et, and just above he tells a sto­ry about The Loathe­some Cou­ple a 1977 book he wrote based a series of real-life mur­ders of British chil­dren by a mar­ried cou­ple. “A lot peo­ple,” he says, would tell him “this one book of yours, I real­ly find a lit­tle… much.”

Goreyphiles out there, and they num­ber in the mil­lions, will thor­ough­ly enjoy these ani­ma­tions (see episode 2, “Fan Mail,” here and 4, “Drac­u­la,” here). Gorey the doc­u­men­tary promis­es to bring us even clos­er to the cur­mud­geon­ly author and artist. His life makes for a quirky series of vignettes, but ulti­mate­ly Gorey was a “Mag­el­lan of the imag­i­na­tion,” says cul­tur­al crit­ic and biog­ra­ph­er Mark Dery. “He jour­neyed vast­ly between his ears…. So that’s where you have to look for the life. On the psy­chic geog­ra­phy of his uncon­scious,” and in the pages of his over 100 sat­is­fy­ing­ly unset­tling books.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edward Gorey Illus­trates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inim­itable Goth­ic Style (1960)

Alfred Hitch­cock Med­i­tates on Sus­pense & Dark Humor in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

The Out­siders: Lou Reed, Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Frank Zap­pa Reveal Them­selves in Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Ani­mat­ed Inter­views

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Maybe we read some cel­e­brat­ed lit­er­ary works the way we eat kale or quinoa—you don’t exact­ly love it but they say it’s, like, a super­food. Not so Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. When I first start­ed read­ing the nov­el, I couldn’t stop. Twelve hours and a cou­ple pots of cof­fee lat­er, I want­ed to read it again right away. It’s a page-turner—not some­thing one often says of lit­er­ary fic­tion beloved by high­brow crit­ics and academics—but I mean it as the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ment.

The book has every fea­ture of a binge-wor­thy soap opera: char­ac­ters we love and love to hate, doomed affairs, sex, vio­lence, end­less fam­i­ly squab­bling, tragedy, intrigue, melo­dra­ma…. Again, this is no crit­i­cism; Mar­quez loved telen­ov­e­las and even wrote a script for one. He want­ed his work to reach as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, to thrill and enter­tain. But he did­n’t with­hold any lit­er­ary nutri­ents either.

The novel’s poet­ic lan­guage, his­tor­i­cal scope, and the­mat­ic and sym­bol­ic com­plex­i­ty has led crit­ics like William Kennedy to com­pare it to the book of Gen­e­sis, and led no small num­ber of read­ers to wild­ly pre­fer it to the Bible or any oth­er ancient book of mythol­o­gy.

If you’re one of the two or three peo­ple who hasn’t read the nov­el, and you don’t find all this praise ful­ly con­vinc­ing, con­sid­er the case made by Fran­cis­co Díez-Buzo in the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above.

The sto­ry, we learn, arrived as an epiphany Mar­quez had while he and his fam­i­ly were on the road to a vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion. He turned the car around, aban­doned the trip, and start­ed writ­ing immediately—an exam­ple of the total com­mit­ment many writ­ers promise them­selves they’ll one day get around to maybe work­ing on. Eigh­teen months and many pots of cof­fee lat­er, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude appeared, intro­duc­ing a world­wide read­er­ship to Mar­quez, mag­i­cal real­ism, and Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, and his­to­ry.

Most every read­er now has a vol­ume of Octavio Paz or Pablo Neru­da on the shelf, and nov­els by Mar­quez, Mario Var­gas Llosa, or Isabelle Allende. Before Cien años de soledad arrived, how­ev­er, this was rarely so out­side of Span­ish-speak­ing coun­tries. The nov­el cre­at­ed a glob­al appetite for rich Latin Amer­i­can tra­di­tions of sto­ry­telling and lyri­cal poet­ry. New trans­la­tions from the region began appear­ing every­where.

Like Faulkner’s entire cor­pus com­pressed into one vol­ume, the epic tale of sev­en gen­er­a­tions of Buendías in the fic­tion­al Colom­bian town of Macon­do is vast and sprawl­ing. It “is not an easy book to read,” says Díez-Buzo. Here, as you might expect, I dis­agree. It is hard­er not to read it once you’ve picked it up. But you will need to read it again, and again, and again.

So packed is the book with detail, allu­sion, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence, and nar­ra­tive that you could read it for the rest of your life and nev­er exhaust its lay­ers of mean­ing. As Harold Bloom put it, “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capac­i­ty of any sin­gle read­er to absorb… There are no wast­ed sen­tences, no mere tran­si­tions, in this nov­el, and you must notice every­thing at the moment you read it.” Pablo Neru­da called it “the great­est rev­e­la­tion in the Span­ish lan­guage since Don Quixote of Cervantes”—the found­ing text of Span­ish-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture and, indeed, of the nov­el form itself.

The super­nat­ur­al and the sur­re­al suf­fuse each page, rais­ing even mun­dane encoun­ters to a myth­ic dimen­sion, stag­ing his­to­ry as time­less dra­ma, played out over and over again through each gen­er­a­tion. In each rep­e­ti­tion, fan­tas­tic and fatal changes also “pro­duce a sense of his­to­ry,” says Díez-Buzo, “as a down­ward spi­ral the char­ac­ters seem pow­er­less to escape.”

It is this his­to­ry that Mar­quez described, when he accept­ed the Nobel Prize in 1982, as “a bound­less realm of haunt­ed men and his­toric women, whose unend­ing obsti­na­cy blurs into leg­end.” Marquez’s own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, full of “haunt­ed men and his­toric women,” served as a mod­el for his suc­ces­sion of fic­tion­al ances­tors. Latin Amer­i­cans, he said, “have not had a moment’s rest,” yet in the face of colo­nial­ist bru­tal­i­ty, civ­il war, dic­ta­tor­ships, “oppres­sion, plun­der­ing and aban­don­ment,” he declared, “we respond with life.” By some strange act of mag­ic, Mar­quez con­tained all of that life in one extra­or­di­nary nov­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s Extra­or­di­nary Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech, “The Soli­tude Of Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Eng­lish & Span­ish (1982)

New Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Dig­i­tal Archive Fea­tures More Than 27,000 Dig­i­tized Let­ters, Man­u­script Pages, Pho­tos & More

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness