Gabriel García Márquez (1928-2014)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel laureate and author of the bestselling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, died at home in Mexico City yesterday, age 87. 

Latin-American journalist, novelist and short story writer, a central figure in the so-called Magic Realism movement. The term was first used in the 1920s Germany to describe some contemporary painters, whose works expressed surrealistic visions. In the late 1940s Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier started to speak of "lo real maravilloso" (marvelous reality). Carpentier recognized the tendency of Latin-American writers to combine fantasy elements and mythology with otherwise realistic fiction. However, García Márquez has considered himself fundamentally a realist, who writes about Colombian and Latin American reality exactly as he has observed it. 

"There is a short but telling portrait of the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who every morning reads a couple of pages of a dictionary (any dictionary except the pompous Diccionario de la Real Academia Española) – a habit our author compares to that of Stendhal, who perused the Napoleonic Code so as to learn to write in a terse and exact style." (from A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, 1996) 

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, in the "banana zone" of Colombia. He was the first child of Luisa Santiaga Márquez, the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, and Gabriel Eligio García, an itinerant homeopath and pharmacist. Soon after Gabriel's birth, his parents left him to be reared by his grandparents and three aunts. Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía, his grandfather, admired greatly Simón Bolivar, and later the author portrayed the hero of South American independence in El general en su laberinto (1989), which traced Simón Bolívar's final journey down the Magdalena river. From his grandmother García Márquez learned the oral tradition. 

At the age of fifteen, he was sent to the Liceo de Zipaquirá, a high school for the gifted. He then studied law and journalism at the National University in Bogóta and at the University of Cartagena. While a law student in Bogota, he dressed like the celebrated singer and actor Carlos Gardel and frequented brothels. Once he was beaten when he failed to pay for the services. His first story, 'The Third Resignation', appeared in 1947. Next year he began his career as a journalist in Cartagena and Barranquilla, and then working in various towns in Latin America and Europe. For a period he secretly attended meetings of a Communist Party cell. One of his most famous reportages was an account of a young sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, who was swept off the Columbian destroyer Caldas into the Caribbean Sea. 

García Márquez was a European correspondent in Rome and Paris for the newspaper El Espectador in 1955, but lost his post when the newspaper was closed down by the dictator Rojas Pinilla. Upon visiting the Soviet Union he concluded that the "Soviets have a different mentality. Things that are of great importance to us aren't to them." He was one of the founders of Prensa Latina, a Cuban press agency, and worked at Prensa Latina office in Havana, where he befriended Fidel Castro, and New York. Due to threatening phone calls from émigré right-wing Cubans García Márquez kept an iron rod by his desk. In 1958 he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo, the daughter of a pharmacist and granddaughter of an Egyptian immigrant. They had two children, Rodrigo, who became a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer. 

After working as editor-in-chief of Susesos and La Familia in Mexico City García Márquez continued his career as a screenwriter, journalist, and publicist. He also co-founded a film school near Havana. For some years he lived Barcelona and returned to Mexico in the late 1970s, before he was officially invited by the new President, Belisario Betancur to Columbia, where he went in 1982 with his family. Although García Márquez has an apartment in Bogotá, most of his time he has spent in Mexico City and at his other homes, Cuernavaca, Havana, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Barcelona, and Paris. His house in Cartagena, built in the 1990s and called La Casa del Escritor, was designed by the Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona. 

When sixty internationally renowned cultural figures condemned in 1971 the arrest of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who was made to "confess" his "counterrevolutionary activity," García Márquez refused to add his name to their open letter to Castro. Also Julio Cortázar did not sign it. However, over the years García Márquez has used his influence to help secure the release of a number of Cuban political prisoners. "I am perhaps the one person Fidel can trust most in the world," he once said in an interview. Another political leader, with whom he associated, was General Omar Torrijos, who seized power in Panama in 1969. He participated in various ways in the campaign to have the famous canal and the adjoining areas placed under Panamanian sovereignty. García Márquez was godfather for Mario Vargas Llosa's second son, but a fist-fight with the Peruvian writer in a Mexican cinema in 1976 broke their relationship for decades. After Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, García Márquez sent a message, saying that finally they are now both equals. 

García Márquez is known all over the Spanish speaking world as "Gabo". His first short stories were published in the 1940s. The novella La hojarasca (1955, Leaf Storm) introduced to the public the fictional Colombian village of Macondo, an equivalent of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Since then it has been the setting in many of his later books. Márquez's early works, starting from Leaf Storm, went unnoticed by scholars and critics, despite their literary merits. From Alejo Carpentier Márquez learned to work with concurrent historical epochs and gradually influences from Faulkner gave way to his more objective manner of depiction, partly derived from his experiences in journalism. Other important writers, who have influenced García Márquez, include Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Juan Rulfo. 

In the short story 'Death Constant Beyond Love' (1970) Márquez sharply observed politics, poverty, and corruption. The protagonist, Senator Onésimo Sánches, is no hero – his electoral campaign is a circus, he takes bribes and helps the local property owners to avoid reform. "His measured, deep voice had the quality of calm water, but the speech that had been memorized and ground out so many times had not occurred to him in the nature of telling the truth, but, rather, as the opposite of a fatalistic pronouncement by Marcus Aurelius in the fourth book of his Meditations." (in Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, 1972). But Stoic understanding of the emptiness of his career doesn't help the senator, and he dies weeping with rage, without the love of Laura Farina, a village girl. 

In 1982 García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. With his Nobel Prize money he bought in 1999 the weekly news magazine Cambio. 

García Márquez's celebrated Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude) was first published by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. It is the history of Macondo, depicted on an epic level, from its mythic foundation to its final disappearance. Combining the world of the bourgeois family chronicle and Latin American history it explores the limits of narrative fiction, wihout the sterility of the French nouveau roman. One Hundred Years of Solitude become one of the most popular works of Magic Realism. Ursula K. Le Guin said in an interview with Amazon.com: "That idea of "realism is literature and every other form of fiction is not literature" didn't get really badly shaken until the magical realists popped up in South America. When you've got García Márquez around, you just can't go on that way." 

García Márquez once said that he tries to tap "the magic in commonplace events." As fantastic as the events seem in the novel, they have much real basis, among them the massacre of hundreds of people, which occurred after the banana workers struck against the United Fruit Company in 1928. Some of the author's own relatives were on the side of the Americans and blamed the strikers for "sabotaging property". The lost historical consciousness of the villagers is exemplified in the chapter, in which the insomnia epidemic threatens to wipe out all layers of identity and culture. "It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." 

Márquez's other major novels and novellas include El otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch), an analysis of dictatorship on mythical and historical level. The wife of the Patriarch of a fictitious Caribbean nation is an ex-nun, whom he kidnaps and possibly murders. When he is already senile, he has an erotic relationship with a twelve-year-old schoolgirl. A false death of the dictator is followed by a second, apparently real, which leads to a new struggle of power. Curiously, the monstrous character is portrayed rather sympathetically; "all dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims," Márquez explained. 

Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981) recounted the murder of a man for allegedly violating the law of honour. Against these dramatic events Márquez sets a small town where everyday life continues in spite everyone knows a murder will happen. Del amor y otros demonios (1995, Love and Other Demons) was a historical novel set in the 18th century Colombia. Although One Hundred years of Solitude is among the most famous modern classics in the world, many consider El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985, Love in the Time of Cholera), which drew on the courtship of his parents, most enduring book. In the novel their names were Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza.

In July 1999 García Marquez was hospitalized and diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. A phony news flash went out through the Internet, claiming he had died in Mexico City. Vivir para contarla  (Living to Tell the Tale), the first part of his memoirs, came out in 2002. It spans the life of the author from his birth to the 1950s. After a long hiatus as a novelist, Márquez published Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004, Memories of My Melancholy Whores), which was immediately translated into 18 languages. The narrator is a ninety-year-old man, who wants to have sex with a 14-year-old virgin. It is the gift he wants to give himself. Marquez's story of an old man and a young girl – a classical subject which goes back to the Book of the Kings and king David among others – stirred some controversy in Columbia. García Marquez's brother Jaime revealed in July 2012, that the author suffers from senile dementia and can no longer write.