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April 19, 2014

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Garcia Marquez wove epics and lived them

NOBEL laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

One of the most revered and influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America’s charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the best-known practitioner of “magical realism,” a blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.

In his works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover’s arrival. A heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home. “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” as one of his short stories is called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.

Garcia Marquez’s own epic story ended on Thursday, at age 87, with his death at his home in Mexico City. He moved there in 1981 after a run-in with the Colombian government.

Known simply as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was considered the Spanish language’s most popular writer since Cervantes in the 17th century. His extraordinary celebrity spawned comparisons with Twain and Dickens.

“A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Twitter. “Such giants never die.”

His flamboyant and melancholy works — including “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Autumn of the Patriarch” — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold over 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.

Its first sentence has become one of the most-famous opening lines of all time: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

With Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was an early practitioner of literary nonfiction known as New Journalism. He was a dedicated journalist.

He wrote about Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, and cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar who shredded the social and moral fabric of Colombia.

But for most people everywhere, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.

When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described the region as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

An ally and a critic

Biographer Gerald Martin called “One Hundred Years of Solitude” “the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, intensity, spirituality, superstition, their grand propensity for failure.”

Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. He became an early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington’s interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage, set off by a white mustache and bushy gray eyebrows, was instantly recognizable.

Denied a US visa for years due to his politics, he was still courted by presidents and kings. Bill Clinton and Francois Mitterrand were his friends.

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town, in March 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist.

The family was poor and Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandparents whose stories inspired his fiction. Aracataca became the model for Macondo, the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is set.

“I have often been told that I started recounting things, stories, almost since I was born,” Garcia Marquez once said.

He became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.

He published his first student fiction in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote, “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to offer.”

He dropped out of law school and became a journalist; eventually he would buy a news magazine. “I’m a journalist and always have been,” he said. “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because everything came from reality.”

Authorities didn’t like some of his work and in 1955, while he was in Europe, the government closed El Espectador. In exile, Garcia Marquez moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema. He went to Paris, living among intellectuals exiled from Latin American dictatorships.

He returned to Colombia in 1958.

Partial list of works

Fiction:

“No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories,” 1961

“One Hundred Years of Solitude,” 1967

“The Autumn of the Patriarch,” 1975

“Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” 1981

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” 1985

“The General in his Labyrinth,” 1989

“Strange Pilgrims,” 1992

“Of Love and Other Demons,” 1994

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” 2004

Nonfiction:

“The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor,” 1970

“News of a Kidnapping,” 1996

Memoir:

“Living to Tell the Tale,” 2002

 

 

 

 




 

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