Sunday Times 2
Nobel winner Garcia Marquez, master of magical realism, dies
View(s):MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died on Thursday. He was 87.
A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece was “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City, where he had returned from hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia.
Known affectionately to friends and fans as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was Latin America’s best-known and most beloved author and his books have sold in the tens of millions.
Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels suchas “Leaf Storm” and “No One Writes to the Colonel” early in his career, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist.
He then found it in dramatic fashion with “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an instant success on publication in 1967. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes dubbed it “Latin America’s Don Quixote” and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda also compared it to Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century tour de force.
Garcia Marquez’s novel tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo, based on the languid town of Aracataca close to Colombia’s Caribbean coast where he was born on March 6, 1927, and raised by his maternal grandparents.
In it, Garcia Marquez combines miraculous and supernatural events with the details of everyday life and the political realities of Latin America. The characters are visited by ghosts, a plague of insomnia envelops Macondo, swarms of yellow butterflies mark the arrival of a woman’s lover, a child is born with a pig’s tail and a priest levitates above the ground.
At times comical and bawdy, and at others tragic, it sold over 30 million copies, was published in dozens of languages and helped fuel a boom in Latin American fiction.
A stocky man with a quick smile, thick mustache and curly hair, Garcia Marquez said he found inspiration for the novel by drawing on childhood memories of his grandmother’s stories – laced with folklore and superstition but delivered with the straightest of faces.
“She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness,” he said in a 1981 interview. “I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself, and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”
In Aracataca, a lone trumpet played on Thursday night as residents held a candlelight vigil for the man who made the town famous.
Magic and reality
Garcia Marquez was one of the prime exponents of magical realism, a genre he described as embodying “myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena.”
His most prolific years coincided with a turbulent period in much of Latin America, where right-wing dictators and Marxist revolutionaries fought for power.
Chaos was often the norm, political violence ripped some countries to shreds and life verged on the surreal. Magical realism struck a chord.
“In his novels and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible – at times obtrusively graphic – descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage,” the Swedish Academy said when it awarded Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in 1982.
Fans will pay their last respects to him in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City on Monday and he will be cremated in a private ceremony.
Garcia Marquez is survived by Mercedes Barcha, his wife of more than 55 years, and by two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
When he was working, Garcia Marquez would wake up before dawn every day, read a book, skim through the newspapers and then write for four hours. His wife would put a yellow rose on his desk.
His last public appearance was on his 87th birthday in March when he came out from his Mexico City home to smile and wave at well-wishers, a yellow rose in the lapel of his gray suit.
| tributes to Garcia Marquez
BOGOTA (Reuters) -Tributes poured in from presidents, authors and pop stars: U.S. President Barack Obama: “With the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers – and one of my favorites from the time I was young … I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo’s work will live on for generations to come. Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who also won the Nobel Prize and once punched Garcia Marquez during a dispute, leaving him with a black eye: “A great writer whose works brought wide knowledge and prestige to the literature of our language has died. His novels will outlive him and continue gaining readers from all over.” Colombian pop star Shakira:“Your life, dear Gabo, will be remembered by all of us as a unique and singular gift, and as the most original story of all.” British novelist Ian McEwan: “He really was a one-off and one would really have to go back to (Charles) Dickens to find a writer of the very highest literary quality who commanded such extraordinary persuasive powers over whole populations, said McEwan. He said Garcia Marquez’s work had “almost a Shakespearean quality.” Granma, the newspaper of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party: “Latin American culture is in mourning. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died.” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff: “With his enchanting prose, Gabo, as he was known, led the reader through his imaginary Macondo as if he was showing a child a new world. His unique characters will remain fixed in the hearts and minds of millions of readers.” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos: “A thousand years of solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” |