Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author best known for his epic novels, 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, passed away last month, on April 17th.  He was the fourth Latin American and first Columbian to ever win the Nobel Prize (1982). Upon his death, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Columbia, described him as the "the greatest Colombian who ever lived".

Garcia Marquez was raised by his maternal grandparents, whose lives deeply influenced his fictions.  His Grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Ricardo Marquez Mejia,was a highly respected Columbian liberal who enchanted his grandson with heroic tales of revolutionaries and set the tone for the socialist and anti-imperialistic views that would later be expressed through his most important works.  His grandmother, also a storyteller, “treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural” tellingghost stories with deadpan seriousness that would also influence both his unique form of magic realism and his narrative voice.

Though he began his career as a journalist, his passion for the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Joyce and especially Virginia Woolf inspired his first attempt at fiction, a novella entitled “The Leaf Storm” about a child’s first experience of death.  This novella takes place during a half hour in a single room and the author claims that, through writing it, he knew that nothing would stop him from trying to become “the best writer in the world.”  He wrote “The Leaf Storm” in 1953, but it would be 14 years (1967) and five books later before he’d see his first royalty check.

From Ernest Hemingway he learned to “stop intellectualizing”—a common tendency he believed ruins young writers.  He learned to “write for his friends” and always had a friend in mind—and concern about what the friend would think—when producing his work.

But most important to his vision as an author was William Faulkner, whose sense of history and the importance of the regional, along with his narrative technique, is most evident in the novels that brought himpopular and critical success:  100 Years of Solitude(1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).  Both novels are stories taken directly from his childhood with his grandparents.  Love in the Time of Cholera is based on his grandparents’ love affair and 100 Years of Solitudeon the greater community in which he grew up. The latter novel sold 30,000,000 copies and solidly affirmed his literary stature.

With literary success he left his native Columbia to livein Barcelona for several years before settling in Mexico City. The theme of solitude pervades his writing, which became more and more concerned with the “solitude of power” as he explored the nature of dictatorship (controversially, he counted among his friends, Fidel Castro and Mario Vargas Llosa) in Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and several of his short-stories.

Often considered the “father of magic realism”—he argued that there was nothing “magical” about his fictions but that they revealed a “psychological suppleness”.  His stories belong to a non-dual, post-quantum world wherein inner and outer experience are part of one field and the observer has the power to influence reality. As such, he leaves out important story details so that his reader must actively participate in the construction of his stories. He claimed that Europeans could see “magic” in his work but could not see the realities of which he spoke because “their rationalism prevents them from seeing that reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.”

Afflicted with lymphoma in 1999, he began writing memoirs which would later become Living to Tell the Tale (2002) and a final novel Memories of my Melancholy Whores. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2012 and died of pneumonia at the age of 87.

Novels[edit]

In Evil Hour (1962)

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

The General in His Labyrinth (1989)

Of Love and Other Demons (1994)

Novellas[edit]

Leaf Storm (1955)

No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

Short story collections[edit]

Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947)

Big Mama's Funeral (1962)

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1978)

Collected Stories (1984)

Strange Pilgrims (1993)

Non-fiction[edit]

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)

The Solitude of Latin America (1982)

The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza)

Clandestine in Chile (1986)

News of a Kidnapping (1996)

A Country for Children (1998)

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Most of the detail for this article comes from the Paris Review interview of the author by Peter Stone, Art of Fiction Issue, Vol. 82, Winter 1981.