Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th Century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. A writer, a thinker, a journalist, a social activist, he was the poster boy of Latin American literary scene, much like the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927, in the town of Aracataca, Colombia near the Caribbean coast. He was the eldest of 12 children; his father was a postal clerk, telegraph operator, and itinerant pharmacist, and when García Márquez was 8, his parents moved away so his father could find a job. García Márquez was left to be raised in a large ramshackle house by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather Nicolas Márquez Mejia was a liberal activist and a colonel during Columbia's Thousand Days War; his grandmother believed in magic and filled her grandson's head with superstitions and folk tales, dancing ghosts and spirits. .
As a 13-year-old, he came to Bogotá to study in a secondary school. When the editor of the liberal magazine "El Espectador" wrote an opinion piece stating that Colombia had no talented young writers, García Márquez sent him a selection of short stories, which the editor published as "Eyes of a Blue Dog." A brief burst of success was interrupted by the assassination of Colombia's president Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. In the following chaos, García Márquez, who had studied law till then, left to become a journalist and investigative reporter in the Caribbean region, a role he would never give up.
In 1954, García Márquez broke a news story about a sailor who survived the shipwreck of a Columbian Navy destroyer. Although the wreck had been attributed to a storm, the sailor reported that badly stowed illegal contraband from the US came loose and knocked eight of the crew overboard. The resulting scandal led to García Márquez's exile to Europe, where he continued writing short stories and news and magazine reports.
In 1955, his first novel, "Leafstorm" (La Hojarasca) was published: it had been written seven years earlier but he could not find a publisher until then. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, New York and elsewhere. In the late 1960s he left journalism to devote himself to his creative writing full-time. Eventually García Márquez settled in Mexico City. In addition to his unforgettable prose works, García Márquez brought world attention to the Latin American literary scene, set up an International Film School near Havana, and a school of journalism on the Caribbean coast.
Gabriel García Márquez’s international breakthrough came with the novel Cien años de soledad (1967) (One Hundred Years of Solitude). He is one of the foremost interpreters of magical realism in literature, a genre in which the framework narrative is set in a real place and time, but supernatural and dreamlike elements are part of the portrayal. The novels El otoño del patriarca (1975) (The Autumn of the Patriarch) and El amor en los tiempos del colera (1985) (Love in the Time of Cholera) cemented his position as one of the greatest Latin American writers of all time.
He is considered a great thinker, who puts complex thoughts into simple
premises. Let me give you a few examples from his writings:
1. I love you not for who you are, but for who I am when I am by your side
2. No person deserves your tears, and who deserves them won’t make you cry
3. Just because someone doesn’t love you as you wish, it doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all their being
4. A true friend is one who holds your hand and touches your heart.
5. The worst way to miss someone is to be seated by their side and know you will never have them
6. You may only be a person in this world, but for someone you are the world.
7. Don’t spend time with someone who doesn’t care spending their’s with you.
8. Never stop smiling even when you are sad. Someone might fall in love with your smile.
9. May be God wants you to meet many wrong people before you meet the right one so you will be thankful when it does happen.
10. Don’t cry because it ended. Smile because it happened.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
García Márquez got the idea for his most famous work while he was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco. To get it written, he holed up for 18 months, while his family went into debt $12,000, but at the end, he had 1,300 pages of manuscript. The first Spanish edition sold out in a week, and over the next 30 years, it sold more than 25 million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
The plot is set in Macondo, a town based on his own hometown of Aracataca, and its saga follows five generations of descendants of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula, and the city they founded. José Arcadio Buendía is based on García Márquez's own grandfather. Events in the story include a plague of insomnia, ghosts that grow old, a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate, a woman who ascends into heaven while doing the laundry, and rain which lasts four years, 11 weeks and two days.
In a 1970 review of the English language
version, Robert Keily of The New York Times said it was a novel "so filled
with humor, rich detail and startling distortion that it brings to mind the
best of [William] Faulkner and Günter Grass." This book is so well
known, even Oprah has put it on her must-read book list. Netflix is even turning this into a series.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers’ eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.
Political Activism
Gabriel García Márquez was a lifelong socialist, and a friend of Fidel Castro's: he wrote for La Prensa in Havana, and always maintained personal ties with the communist party in Colombia, even though he never joined as a member. A Venezuelan newspaper sent him behind the Iron Curtain to the Balkan States, and he discovered that far from an ideal Communist life, the Eastern European people lived in terror.
He was repeatedly denied tourist visas to the United States because of his leftist leanings but was criticized by activists at home for not totally committing to communism. His first visit to the U.S. was the result of an invitation by President Bill Clinton to Martha's Vineyard.
In 1975, the dictator Augustin Pinochet came to power in Chile, and García Márquez swore he would never write another novel until Pinochet was gone. Pinochet was to remain in power for a grueling 17 years, and by 1981, García Márquez realized that he was allowing Pinochet to censor him. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" was published in 1981, the retelling of a horrific murder of one of his childhood friends. The protagonist, a "merry and peaceful, and openhearted" son of a wealthy merchant, is hacked to death; the whole town knows in advance and can't (or won't) prevent it, even though the town doesn't really think he's guilty of the crime he's been accused of: a plague of inability to act.
In 1986, "Love in the Time of Cholera" was published, a romantic narrative of two star-crossed lovers who meet but don't connect again for over 50 years. Cholera in the title refers to both the disease and anger taken to the extreme of warfare. Thomas Pynchon, reviewing the book in the New York Times, extolled "the swing and translucency of writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers."
Magical realism, according to Gabo, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “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.”
Every good thing has to end
In 1999, Gabriel García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphoma, but continued to write until 2004, when reviews of "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" were mixed—it was banned in Iran. After that, he slowly sank into dementia, dying in Mexico City on April 17, 2014.
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