Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez, (b. March 6, 1928, Aracataca,
Colombia), Colombian novelist and one of the greatest
writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1982 (see Nobel Lecture: “The Solitude of
Latin America”), 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 is a superb
crafter of short stories and an accomplished journalist. In
both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez
achieves 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 and Tranquilina Iguarán de Márquez.
After the Colonel’s death, they moved to Sucre, 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 his
grandfather Nicolás 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 he worked in
Caracas and then in New York for Prensa Latina, the news
service created by the Castro regime. 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 Fidel
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 these books are El
amor en los tiempos del cólera, 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).
Roberto González
Echevarría
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.
Ed.
