Gabriel García Márquez

Early life : "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work". —Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, in the Caribbean region of Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved with his wife to the nearby large port city of Barranquilla, leaving young Gabriel in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. In December 1936, his father took him and his brother to Sincé. However, when his grandfather died in March 1937, the family moved first (back) to Barranquilla and then on to Sucre, where his father started a pharmacy. When his parents had fallen in love, their relationship was met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Márquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: Gabriel Eligio was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer. Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him. (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.) Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life, his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly. His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo", The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected. He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year after García Márquez was born. The Colonel, whom García Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality", was also an excellent storyteller. He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store. He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs", reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels. García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an important and influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural." The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents, all of which were studiously ignored by her husband. Education and adulthood After arriving at Sucre, it was decided that García Márquez should start his formal education and he was sent to an internship in Barranquilla, a port on the mouth of the Río Magdalena. There, he gained a reputation of being a timid boy who wrote humorous poems and drew humorous comic strips. Serious and little interested in athletic activities, he was called El Viejo by his classmates. He attended a Jesuit college to study law. After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez stayed in Bogotá to study law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, but spent most of his spare time reading fiction. He was inspired by The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, at the time incorrectly thought to have been translated by Jorge Luis Borges. His first published work, "La tercera resignación", appeared in the 13 September 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador. From 1947 to 1955, he wrote a series of short stories that were later published under the title of "Eyes of a Blue Dog". Though his passion was writing, he continued with law in 1948 to please his father. After the Bogotazo riots on 9 April following the assassination of a popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house was burned. García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena and began working as a reporter of El Universal. In 1950, he ended his legal studies to focus on journalism and moved again to Barranquilla to work as a columnist and reporter in the newspaper El Heraldo. Universities, including Columbia University in the City of New York, have given him an honorary doctorate in writing. García Márquez noted of his time at El Heraldo, "I'd write a piece and they'd pay me three pesos for it, and maybe an editorial for another three." During this time he became an active member of the informal group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that provided great motivation and inspiration for his literary career. He worked with inspirational figures such as Ramon Vinyes, whom García Márquez depicted as an Old Catalan who owns a bookstore in One Hundred Years of Solitude. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and regularly wrote for Bogotá's El Espectador. From 1956, he spent two years in Europe, returning to marry Mercedes Barcha in Barranquilla in 1958, and to work on magazines in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1991, he published Changing the History of Africa, an admiring study of Cuban activities in the Angolan Civil War and the larger South African Border War. He maintained a close but "nuanced" friendship with Fidel Castro, praising the achievements of the Cuban Revolution but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften [the] roughest edges" of the country. García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories. This influenced his political views and his literary technique so that "in the same way that his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States." The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a series of 14 news articles in which he revealed the hidden story of how a Colombian Navy vessel's shipwreck "occurred because the boat contained a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that broke loose on the deck." García Márquez compiled this story through interviews with a young sailor who survived the wreck. He wrote about his experiences for El Independiente, a newspaper that briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and was later shut down by Colombian authorities. QAP García Márquez was one of the original founders of QAP, a Colombian newscast that aired between 1992 and 1997. He was attracted to the project by the promise of editorial and journalistic independence. Marriage and family in Paris (France), where García Márquez lived in 1956 García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was at school; he was 14 and she was 9. The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born. García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner. Three years later, the couple's second son, Gonzalo García, was born in Mexico. As of 2001, Gonzalo is a graphic designer in Mexico City. Leaf Storm Leaf Storm (La Hojarasca) is García Márquez's first novella and took seven years to find a publisher, finally being published in 1955. García Márquez notes that "of all that he had written (as of 1973), Leaf Storm was his favorite because he felt that it was the most sincere and spontaneous." All the events of the novella take place in one room, during a half-hour period on Wednesday 12 September 1928. It is the story of an old colonel (similar to García Márquez's own grandfather) who tries to give a proper Christian burial to an unpopular French doctor. The colonel is supported only by his daughter and grandson. The novella explores the child's first experience with death by following his stream of consciousness. The book reveals the perspective of Isabel, the Colonel's daughter, which provides a feminine point of view. One Hundred Years of Solitude From when he was 18, García Márquez had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents' house where he grew up. However, he struggled with finding an appropriate tone and put off the idea until one day the answer hit him while driving his family to Acapulco. He turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing. He sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote. Writing the novel took far longer than he expected; he wrote every day for 18 months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. During the 18 months of writing, García Márquez met with two couples, Eran Carmen and Álvaro Mutis, and María Luisa Elío and Jomí García Ascot, every night and discussed the progress of the novel, trying out different versions. When the book was published in 1967, it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad; English translation by Gregory Rabassa, 1970), selling over 50 million copies. The book was dedicated to Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío. The novel was widely popular and led to García Márquez's Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. William Kennedy has called it "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race," and hundreds of articles and books of literary critique have been published in response to it. Despite the many accolades the book received, García Márquez tended to downplay its success. He once remarked: "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends, and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves." The popularity of his writing also led to friendships with powerful leaders, including one with former Cuban president Fidel Castro, which has been analyzed in Gabo and Fidel: Portrait of a Friendship. It was during this time that he was punched in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa in what became one of the largest feuds in modern literature. In an interview with Claudia Dreifus in 1982 García Márquez noted his relationship with Castro was mostly based on literature: "Ours is an intellectual friendship. It may not be widely known that Fidel is a very cultured man. When we're together, we talk a great deal about literature." This relationship was criticized by Cuban exile writer Reinaldo Arenas, in his 1992 memoir Antes de que Anochezca (Before Night Falls). Due to his newfound fame and his outspoken views on US imperialism, García Márquez was labeled as a subversive and for many years was denied visas by US immigration authorities. After Bill Clinton was elected US president, he lifted the travel ban and cited One Hundred Years of Solitude as his favorite novel. García Márquez began writing Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca) in 1968 and said it was finished in 1971; however, he continued to embellish the dictator novel until 1975 when it was published in Spain. According to García Márquez, the novel is a "poem on the solitude of power" as it follows the life of an eternal dictator known as the General. The novel is developed through a series of anecdotes related to the life of the General, which do not appear in chronological order. Although the exact location of the story is not pin-pointed in the novel, the imaginary country is situated somewhere in the Caribbean. García Márquez gave his own explanation of the plot: My intention was always to make a synthesis of all the Latin American dictators, but especially those from the Caribbean. Nevertheless, the personality of Juan Vicente Gomez [of Venezuela] was so strong, in addition to the fact that he exercised a special fascination over me, that undoubtedly the Patriarch has much more of him than anyone else. The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother () presents the story of a young mulatto girl who dreams of freedom, but cannot escape the reach of her avaricious grandmother. Eréndira and her grandmother make an appearance in an earlier novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother was published in 1972. The novella was adapted to the 1983 art film Eréndira, directed by Ruy Guerra. is inspired by a real-life murder that took place in Sucre, Colombia, in 1951, but García Márquez maintained that nothing of the actual events remains beyond the point of departure and the structure. The character of Santiago Nasar is based on a good friend from García Márquez's childhood, Cayetano Gentile Chimento. The plot of the novel revolves around Santiago Nasar's murder. The narrator acts as a detective, uncovering the events of the murder as the novel proceeds. Pelayo notes that the story "unfolds in an inverted fashion. Instead of moving forward... the plot moves backward." Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the year before García Márquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. Love in the Time of Cholera is based on the stories of two couples. The young love of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza is based on the love affair of García Márquez's parents. But as García Márquez explained in an interview: "The only difference is [my parents] married. And as soon as they were married, they were no longer interesting as literary figures." News of a Kidnapping News of a Kidnapping (Noticia de un secuestro) was first published in 1996. It examines a series of related kidnappings and narcoterrorist actions committed in the early 1990s in Colombia by the Medellín Cartel, a drug cartel founded and operated by Pablo Escobar. The text recounts the kidnapping, imprisonment, and eventual release of prominent figures in Colombia, including politicians and members of the press. The original idea was proposed to García Márquez by the former minister for education Maruja Pachón Castro and Colombian diplomat Luis Alberto Villamizar Cárdenas, both of whom were among the many victims of Pablo Escobar's attempt to pressure the government to stop his extradition by committing a series of kidnappings, murders and terrorist actions. Living to Tell the Tale and Memories of My Melancholy Whores In 2002 García Márquez published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. Edith Grossman's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale, was published in November 2003. October 2004 brought the publication of a novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Memoria de mis putas tristes), a love story that follows the romance of a 90-year-old man and a child forced into prostitution. Memories of My Melancholy Whores caused controversy in Iran, where it was banned after an initial 5,000 copies were printed and sold. Film and opera (left) at the Guadalajara International Film Festival, in Guadalajara, Mexico (March 2009) Critics often describe the language that García Márquez's imagination produces as visual or graphic, and he himself explains each of his stories is inspired by "a visual image," so it comes as no surprise that he had a long and involved history with film. He was a film critic, he founded and served as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana, García Márquez originally wrote his Eréndira as a third screenplay, but this version was lost and replaced by the novella. Nonetheless, he worked on rewriting the script in collaboration with Ruy Guerra, and the film was released in Mexico in 1983. Several of his stories have inspired other writers and directors. In 1987, the Italian director Francesco Rosi directed the movie Cronaca di una morte annunciata based on Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Several film adaptations have been made in Mexico, including Miguel Littín's La Viuda de Montiel (1979), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's Maria de mi corazón (1979), and Arturo Ripstein's El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1998). British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) filmed Love in the Time of Cholera in Cartagena, Colombia, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). The film was released in the U.S. on 16 November 2007. Later life and death Declining health In 1999 García Márquez was misdiagnosed with pneumonia instead of lymphatic cancer. Chemotherapy at a hospital in Los Angeles proved to be successful, and the illness went into remission. This event prompted García Márquez to begin writing his memoirs: "I reduced relations with my friends to a minimum, disconnected the telephone, canceled the trips and all sorts of current and future plans", he told El Tiempo, the Colombian newspaper, "and locked myself in to write every day without interruption." He stated that 2005 "was the first [year] in my life in which I haven't written even a line. With my experience, I could write a new novel without any problems, but people would realise my heart wasn't in it." However, in April 2009 his agent, Carmen Balcells, told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera that García Márquez was unlikely to write again. In 2023 it was announced that the novel, whose English title was to be Until August, would be released posthumously in 2024. The book was published posthumously on the 97th anniversary of his birth, 6 March 2024, against Márquez's own wishes that the manuscript be destroyed after his death. In December 2008 García Márquez told fans at the Guadalajara book fair that writing had worn him out. In 2009, responding to claims by both his literary agent and his biographer that his writing career was over, he told Colombian newspaper El Tiempo: "Not only is it not true, but the only thing I do is write". In 2012 his brother Jaime announced that García Márquez was suffering from dementia. In April 2014, García Márquez was hospitalized in Mexico. He had infections in his lungs and his urinary tract, and was suffering from dehydration. He was responding well to antibiotics. Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto wrote on Twitter, "I wish him a speedy recovery". Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said his country was thinking of the author and said in a tweet: "All of Colombia wishes a speedy recovery to the greatest of all time: Gabriel García Márquez." Death García Márquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014, in Mexico City. His death was confirmed by Fernanda Familiar on Twitter, and by his former editor Cristóbal Pera. The Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos mentioned: "One Hundred Years of Solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time". At the time of his death, García Márquez had a wife and two sons. In February 2015, the heirs of Gabriel García Márquez deposited a legacy of the writer in his Memoriam in the Caja de las Letras of the Instituto Cervantes. ==Style==

''" hat, typical of the Colombian Caribbean region. Most of the stories by García Márquez revolve around the idiosyncrasy of this region. In every book I try to make a different path ... . One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean. García Márquez was noted for leaving out seemingly important details and events so the reader is forced into a more participatory role in the story development. For example, in No One Writes to the Colonel, the main characters are not given names. This practice is influenced by Greek tragedies, such as Antigone and Oedipus Rex, in which important events occur off-stage and are left to the audience's imagination. Realism and magical realism Reality is an important theme in all of García Márquez's works. He said of his early works (with the exception of Leaf Storm), "Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and ''Big Mama's Funeral'' all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don't regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality." In his other works he experimented more with less traditional approaches to reality, so that "the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression". A commonly cited example is the physical and spiritual ascending into heaven of a character while she is hanging the laundry out to dry in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The style of these works fits in the "marvellous realm" described by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and was labeled as magical realism. Literary critic Michael Bell proposes an alternative understanding for García Márquez's style, as the category magic realism is criticized for being dichotomizing and exoticizing, "what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed." García Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way, ==Themes==

Solitude The theme of solitude runs through much of García Márquez's works. As Pelayo notes, "Love in the Time of Cholera, like all of Gabriel García Márquez's work, explores the solitude of the individual and of humankind...portrayed through the solitude of love and of being in love". In response to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's question, "If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood perhaps?" García Márquez replied, "I think it's a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously." In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Solitude of Latin America, he relates this theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary." Macondo Another important theme in many of García Márquez's work is the setting of the village he calls Macondo. He uses his home town of Aracataca, Colombia as a cultural, historical and geographical reference to create this imaginary town, but the representation of the village is not limited to this specific area. García Márquez shares, "Macondo is not so much a place as a state of mind, which allows you to see what you want, and how you want to see it." Even when his stories do not take place in Macondo, there is often still a consistent lack of specificity to the location. So while they are often set with "a Caribbean coastline and an Andean hinterland... [the settings are] otherwise unspecified, in accordance with García Márquez's evident attempt to capture a more general regional myth rather than give a specific political analysis." This fictional town has become well known in the literary world. As Stavans notes of Macondo, "its geography and inhabitants constantly invoked by teachers, politicians, and tourist agents..." makes it "...hard to believe it is a sheer fabrication." In Leaf Storm García Márquez depicts the realities of the Banana Boom in Macondo, which include a period of great wealth during the presence of the US companies and a period of depression upon the departure of the American banana companies. One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in Macondo and tells the complete history of the fictional town from its founding to its doom. The account of Macondo in Constance Pedoto, in "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" has been compared to tales from Alaska which combine the real and the surreal, deriving from an upbringing which combined superstitious beliefs and a harsh environment. In his autobiography, García Márquez explains his fascination with the word and concept Macondo. He describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man: La Violencia In several of García Márquez's works, including No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Leaf Storm, he referenced La Violencia (the violence), "a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals that lasted into the 1960s, causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Colombians". Throughout all of his novels there are subtle references to la violencia. For example, characters live under various unjust situations like curfew, press censorship, and underground newspapers. In Evil Hour, while not one of García Márquez's most famous novels, is notable for its portrayal of la violencia with its "fragmented portrayal of social disintegration provoked by la violencia". Although García Márquez did portray the corrupt nature and the injustices of times like la violencia, he refused to use his work as a platform for political propaganda. "For him, the duty of the revolutionary writer is to write well, and the ideal novel is one that moves its reader by its political and social content, and, at the same time, by its power to penetrate reality and expose its other side. (to his left) and Adonias Filho (to his right) ==Legacy==

, Colombia. García Márquez's work is an important part of the Latin American Boom of literature, often defined around his works, and those of Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. His work has challenged critics of Colombian literature to step out of the conservative criticism that had been dominant before the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In a review of literary criticism Robert Sims notes, In 2023, García Márquez surpassed Miguel de Cervantes as the most translated Spanish-language writer according to the World Translation Map. The ranking is based on works translated into 10 languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish. García Márquez is also the most translated Spanish-language author between 2000–2021 ahead of Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Roberto Bolaño, Cervantes and more. Nobel Prize García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 December 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". His acceptance speech was entitled "The Solitude of Latin America". García Márquez was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. After becoming a Nobel laureate, García Márquez stated to a correspondent: "I have the impression that in giving me the prize, they have taken into account the literature of the sub-continent and have awarded me as a way of awarding all of this literature". == García Márquez in fiction ==

A year after his death, García Márquez appears as a notable character in Claudia Amengual's novel Cartagena, set in Uruguay and Colombia. In Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams, the protagonist Mariquita Samper shoots the narrator of the Latin American Boom, presumed by critics to be the figure of García Marquez; in Braschi's Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! characters debate the importance of García Márquez and Isabel Allende during a heated dinner party scene. ==List of works==

Novels • In Evil Hour (1962) Novellas • Leaf Storm (1955) • Innocent Eréndira, and other stories (1978) • Collected Stories (1984) • Strange Pilgrims (1993) Short stories • "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" (1968) • "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (1968) • "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother" (1972) • "The General's Departure" (1990) Non-fiction • 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) • Changing the History of Africa: Angola and Namibia (1991, with David Deutschmann) • News of a Kidnapping (1997) • A Country for Children (1998) • Living to Tell the Tale (2002) • The Scandal of the Century: Selected Journalistic Writings, 1950–1984 (2019) Films Adaptations based on his works • There Are No Thieves in This Village (1965, Alberto Isaac; also as actor) • The Sea of Lost Time (1980, Solveig Hoogesteijn) • One Hundred Years of Solitude (1981, Shūji Terayama) • Farewell to the Ark (1984, Shūji Terayama) • Time to Die (1984, Jorge Alí Triana) • Only Death Is Bound to Come (1992, Marina Tsurtsumia) • Bloody Morning (1993, Shaohong Li) • No One Writes to the Colonel (1999, Arturo Ripstein) • Love in the Time of Cholera (2007, Mike Newell) ==See also==