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Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez, (born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colombia—died April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mexico), Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mostly for his masterpiece Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude). He was the fourth Latin American to be so honoured, having been preceded by Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971 and by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967. With Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez is the best-known Latin American writer in history. In addition to his masterly approach to the novel, he was a superb crafter of short stories and an accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.
LIFE Born in the sleepy provincial town of Aracataca, Colombia, García Márquez and his parents spent the first eight years of his life with his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez (a veteran of the War of a Thousand Days [1899–1903]) and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez. After Nicolás’s death, they moved to Barranquilla, a river port. He received a better-than-average education but claimed as an adult that his most important literary sources were the stories about Aracataca and his family that Nicolás had told him. Although he studied law, García Márquez became a journalist, the trade at which he earned his living before attaining literary fame. As a correspondent in Paris during the 1950s, he expanded his education, reading a great deal of American literature, some of it in French translation. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he worked in Bogotá, Colombia, and then in New York City for Prensa Latina, the news service created by the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Later he moved to Mexico City, where he wrote the novel that brought him fame and wealth. From 1967 to 1975 he lived in Spain. Subsequently he kept a house in Mexico City and an apartment in Paris, but he also spent much time in Havana, where Castro (whom García Márquez supported) provided him with a mansion.
WORKS Before 1967 García Márquez had published two novels, La hojarasca (1955; The Leaf Storm) and La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour); a novella, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; No One Writes to the Colonel); and a few short stories. Then came One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which García Márquez tells the story of Macondo, an isolated town whose history is like the history of Latin America on a reduced scale. While the setting is realistic, there are fantastic episodes, a combination that has come to be known as “magic realism,” wrongly thought to be the peculiar feature of all Latin American literature. Mixing historical facts and stories with instances of the fantastic is a practice that García Márquez derived from Cuban master Alejo Carpentier, considered to be one of the founders of magic realism. The inhabitants of Macondo are driven by elemental passions—lust, greed, thirst for power—which are thwarted by crude societal, political, or natural forces, as in Greek tragedy and myth.
Continuing his magisterial output, García Márquez issued El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch), Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold), El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera; filmed 2007), El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth), and Del amor y otros demonios (1994; Of Love and Other Demons). The best among those books are Love in the Time of Cholera, about a touching love affair that takes decades to be consummated, and The General in His Labyrinth, a chronicle of Simón Bolívar’s last days. In 1996 García Márquez published a journalistic chronicle of drug-related kidnappings in his native Colombia, Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping). After being diagnosed with cancer in 1999, García Márquez wrote the memoir Vivir para contarla (2002; Living to Tell the Tale), which focuses on his first 30 years. He returned to fiction with Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of My Melancholy Whores), a novel about a lonely man who finally discovers the meaning of love when he hires a virginal prostitute to celebrate his 90th birthday.
LEGACY García Márquez was known for his capacity to create vast, minutely woven plots and brief, tightly knit narratives in the fashion of his two North American models, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. The easy flow of even the most intricate of his stories has been compared to that of Miguel de Cervantes, as have his irony and overall humour. García Márquez’s novelistic world is mostly that of provincial Colombia, where medieval and modern practices and beliefs clash both comically and tragically.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982 was awarded to Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982 With this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature to the Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, the Swedish Academy cannot be said to bring forward an unknown writer. García Márquez achieved unusual international success as a writer with his novel in 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The novel has been translated into a large number of languages and has sold millions of copies. It is still being reprinted and read with undiminished interest by new readers. Such a success with a single book could be fatal for a writer with less resources than those possessed by García Márquez. He has, however, gradually confirmed his position as a rare storyteller, richly endowed with a material from imagination and experience which seems inexhaustible. In breadth and epic richness, for instance, the novel, El otoño del patriarca, 1975, (The Autumn of the Patriarch) compares favourably with the firstmentioned work. Short novels such as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (No One Writes to the Colonel), La mala hora, 1962 (In Evil Hour), or last year’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), complement the picture of a writer who combines the copious, almost overwhelming narrative talent with the mastery of the conscious, disciplined and widely read artist of language. A large number of short stories, published in several collections or in magazines, give further proof of the great versatility of García Márquez’s narrative gift. His international successes have continued. Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance, translated into many languages and published as quickly as possible in large editions.
Nor can it be said that any unknown literary continent or province is brought to light with the prize to Gabriel García Márquez. For a long time, Latin American literature has shown a vigour as in few other literary spheres, having won acclaim in the cultural life of today. Many impulses and traditions cross each other. Folk culture, including oral storytelling, reminiscences from old Indian culture, currents from Spanish baroque in different epochs, influences from European surrealism and other modernism are blended into a spiced and life-giving brew from which García Márquez and other Spanish-American writers derive material and inspiration. The violent conflicts of a political nature – social and economic – raise the temperature of the intellectual climate. Like most of the other important writers in the Latin American world, García Márquez is strongly committed, politically, on the side of the poor and the weak against domestic oppression and foreign economic exploitation. Apart from his fictional production, he has been very active as a journalist, his writings being many-sided, inventive, often, provocative, and by no means limited to political subjects.
The great novels remind one of William Faulkner. García Márquez has created a world of his own around the imaginary town of Macondo. Since the end of the 1940s his novels and short stories have led us into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge – the extravagant flight of his own fantasy, traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions, tangible, at times, obtrusively graphic, descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage. As with Faulkner, or why not Balzac, the same chief characters and minor persons crop up in different stories, brought forward into the light in various ways – sometimes in dramatically revealing situations, sometimes in comic and grotesque complications of a kind that only the wildest imagination or shameless reality itself can achieve. Manias and passions harass them. Absurdities of war let courage change shape with craziness, infamy with chivalry, cunning with madness. Death is perhaps the most important director behind the scenes in García Márquez’s invented and discovered world. Often his stories revolve around a dead person – someone who has died, is dying or will die. A tragic sense of life characterizes García Márquez’s books – a sense of the incorruptible superiority of fate and the inhuman, inexorable ravages of history. But this awareness of death and tragic sense of life is broken by the narrative’s apparently unlimited, ingenious vitality which, in its turn, is a representative of the at once frightening and edifying vital force of reality and life itself. The comedy and grotesqueness in García Márquez can be cruel, but can also glide over into a conciliating humour. With his stories, Gabriel García Márquez has created a world of his own which is a microcosmos. In its tumultuous, bewildering, yet, graphically convincing authenticity, it reflects a continent and its human riches and poverty. Perhaps more than that: a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the bounds of chaos – killing and procreation.
87 Facts about Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his 87th Birthday
Yesterday probably the greatest living Colombian turned 87 years old – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (or Gabo to his friends). What a life it’s been: from the little town of Aracataca to the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gabo has retained his massive popularity in Colombia thanks to his easy costeno charm, and love of the good life. And of course, the books aren’t bad either… So here, in the spirit of our Fernando Botero birthday post, are 87 facts (disclaimer: some more factual than others) celebrating the life and times of Gabo.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6th, 1927, in the town of Aracataca, Magdalena. Gabo fans can visit Araca aca to see the house where he was born. He was the oldest of 12 children born to his parents. However, his mother had 11 children and his father 15 (four out of wedlock). 1. He claimed that he did not really know his mother until he was 7. His was raised by his maternal grandparents. They were a particularly strong influence on his life, predominantly his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. 1. “My grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government.” He said that after his grandfather died, “nothing else of importance ever happened to me.” His grandmother was equally inspiring, especially the way she “treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural.” Her storytelling would strongly influence the style of his most famous works. The Colonel was strongly opposed to his parent’s marriage, but the persistence of Gabo’s father eventually forced him to grant permission.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6th, 1927, in the town of Aracataca, Magdalena. Gabo fans can visit Aracataca to see the house where he was born. He was the oldest of 12 children born to his parents. However, his mother had 11 children and his father 15 (four out of wedlock). He claimed that he did not really know his mother until he was 7. His was raised by his maternal grandparents. They were a particularly strong influence on his life, predominantly his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. “My grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government.” He said that after his grandfather died, “nothing else of importance ever happened to me.” His grandmother was equally inspiring, especially the way she “treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural.” Her storytelling would strongly influence the style of his most famous works. The Colonel was strongly opposed to his parent’s marriage, but the persistence of Gabo’s father eventually forced him to grant permission. Young Gabo showed talent in painting, singing and writing, and could probably have made a career in any of these.
He travelled to school on a river steamer up the great Magdalena river to the capital Bogotá. Gabo studied Law at the National University of Colombia. He began his career as a journalist at El UniverHe lived in a brothel known as ‘The Skyscraper’ in Barranquilla. He then became a film critic for El Espectador in Bogota. His coverage of a shipwreck which contradicted the Colombian government’s official version of events caused the paper to send him to Europe as a foreign correspondent. “Owing to his hands on experiences in journalism, García Márquez is, of all the great living authors, the one who is closest to everyday reality” – Gene H. Bell-Villada. His first novella, Leaf Storm, was published in 1955. He felt that it was “the most sincere and spontaneous” of his works. In 1958 he was married to Mercedes Barcha, whom he had met while she was in college. “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.” Their first son, Rodrigo Garcia, was born the following year. The family settled in Mexico City in 1961, following a Greyhound Bus journey across the southern United States.
This journey was inspired by one of Gabo’s great literary loves, William Faulkner. They had a second son, Gonzalo, in Mexico City. One day, whilst driving to Acapulco with his family, he was struck by an idea: he turned the car around and went home so he could begin writing. He sold his car for money, and wrote everyday for 18 months. In 1967, the fruits of this labour were revealed to the world: One Hundred Years of Solitude was the title. Telling the story of the Colombian town of Macondo, the novel was his most successful ever. I first read it when I was 14. I never really thought I’d end up living in Colombia… In 2006, Aracataca organized a referendum to change its name to Aracataca-Macondo. The ‘yes’ vote won, but low voter turnout scuppered the plan. “Most critics don’t realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.”
After this book, Gabo relocated his family to Barcelona for seven years. Over this period he became friends with many famous and powerful people, including, controversially, Fidel Castro. “Ours is an intellectual friendship. It may not be widely known that Fidel is a very cultured man. When we’re together, we talk a great deal about literature.” I’m friends with some pretty famous and powerful people too, although I’m not at liberty to give you their names… During this period he was famously punched in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa at a theater in Mexico, beginning one of the most famous feuds in literary history. Nobel vs Nobel His outspoken views on US Imperialism led to him being denied entry to the United States for many years. Bill Clinton lifted this ban, and a street in East L.A. now bears Gabo’s name. The flight of Venezuelan dictator, Marcos Perez Jiminez, inspired his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, published in 1975. “My intention was always to make a synthesis of all the Latin American dictators, but especially those from the Caribbean.” After this novel was published, the Garcia Marquez family moved back to Mexico City. “That guy? He’s awesome!” – JL Pastor, See Colombia Travel. He also pledged not to publish again until Augusto Pinochet was deposed.
He eventually published Chronicle of a Death Foretold with Pinochet still in power, as he “could not remain silent in the face of injustice and repression.” This novel was published in 1981. In 1982, Garcia Marquez was presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature, to great celebration in Colombia. From his Nobel Prize Lecture: “Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. “ When he won the Nobel Prize his mother was quoted as saying, “Maybe now I’ll get my telephone fixed.” He turned up to the ceremony in traditional Caribbean garb. Paul Fowler, a previous See Colombia Editor, was once offered a Nobel Prize, but turned it down. In 1985, he published Love in the Time of Cholera. This was seen as a non-traditional love story, as the protagonists are both in their 80s when the story takes place.
The novel was made
into a film starring Javier Bardem in 2007. To be fair to Gabo, the movie isn’t great… Most of his novels have been filmed but he has always refused to let One Hundred Years of Solitude be turned into a movie. “They would cast someone like Robert Redford and most of us do not
have relatives who look like Robert Redford.” In 1999, Gabo was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and his impending death was falsely reported by several newspapers. This illness prompted Gabo to begin writing his memoirs. “I reduced relations with my friends to a minimum, disconnected the telephone, cancelled the trips and all sorts of current and future plans, and locked myself in to write every day without interruption.” In 2002, he published Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume in a planned trilogy of memoirs. His 2004 novel, Memories of my Melancholy Whores was banned in Iran. He claimed that 2005 was “was the first [year] in my life in which I haven’t written even a line.” Reports surfaced in 2008 that he was beginning a new novel, to be published that year. However, in 2009, his agent stated that he was unlikely to write again.
Random House disputed this and claimed he would soon publish a novel entitled We’ll Meet in August. In 2012, his family stated that he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease for several years. “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” According to a website that I found, he has been alive for 45,759,775 minutes and counting… I can’t really get my head around that… “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams” – Good advice to live by. He has 7 houses in 4 countries. Gabo has founded major institutes of film (in Havana) and journalism (in Cartagena, Colombia). He smoked 60 cigarettes a day until he was almost 50. According to William Kennedy, One Hundred Years of Solitude is “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” He used to fight crime under the pseudonym, Costeno Man. I might have made that fact up… “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”
This list is even more difficult than the Fernando Botero one…why can’t Gabo be turning 50? Gabo is extremely superstitious, and never wears gold (that one’s actually true). See Colombia Travel loves Gabriel Garcia Marquez. How about you?