Gabriel García Márquez
Encyclopedia
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (ɡaˈβɾjel ɡaɾˈsia ˈmaɾkes; born March 6, 1927) is a Colombia
n novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter
and journalist
, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America
. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1982, and is the earliest winner of this prize who is still alive. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novel
s, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera
(1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo
(the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca
), and most of them express the theme of solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in the town of Aracataca
, Colombia
, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez. Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist. In January 1929, his parents moved to Sucre
while García Marquez stayed in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. When he was nine, his grandfather died, and he moved to his parents' home in Sucre where his father owned a pharmacy.
When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Marquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (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 telegraph 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. Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry 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", was a Liberal
veteran of the Thousand Days War
. 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 García Márquez was born. The Colonel, whom García Márquez has 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 political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories. In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government." 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."
García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an equally 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. According to García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality". He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
. In 1948 and 1949 he wrote for El Universal
in Cartagena
. Later, from 1950 until 1952, he wrote a "whimsical" column under the name of "Septimus" for the local paper El Heraldo in Barranquilla
. 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. At this time, García Márquez was also introduced to the works of writers such as Virginia Woolf
and William Faulkner
. Faulkner's narrative techniques, historical themes and use of rural locations influenced many Latin American authors. The environment of Barranquilla gave García Márquez a world-class literary education and provided him with a unique perspective on Caribbean culture. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and regularly wrote for Bogotá
's El Espectador
. He was a regular film critic which drove his interest in film.
In 1994, along with his brother Jaime and with lawyer Jaime Abello, he founded the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (New Iberoamerican Journalism Foundation), which aims to help young journalists learn with teachers such as Alma Guillermoprieto
or Jon Lee Anderson
, and to stimulate new ways to do journalism. García Márquez is still the foundation's president.
García Márquez compiled this story through interviews with a young sailor who survived the shipwreck. The publication of the articles resulted in public controversy, as they discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor.
In response to this controversy El Espectador sent García Márquez away to Europe to be a foreign correspondent. He wrote about his experiences for El Independiente
, a newspaper which had briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla
and was later shut down by Colombian authorities. García Márquez's background in journalism provided a foundational base for his writing career. Literary critic Bell-Villada noted, "Owing to his hands on experiences in journalism, García Márquez is, of all the great living authors, the one who is closest to everyday reality."
bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City
. 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, was born in Mexico. Gonzalo is currently a graphic designer in Mexico City.
. 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, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, and he wrote every day for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation
by Gregory Rabassa
1970). The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they founded the fictional South American village of Macondo
, through their trials and tribulations, instances of incest, births and deaths. The history of Macondo is often generalized by critics to represent rural towns throughout Latin America
or at least near García Márquez's native Aracataca
.
This novel was widely popular and led to García Márquez's Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize
in 1972. 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. However, García Márquez himself does not completely understand the success of this particular book: "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."
After writing One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez returned to Europe, this time bringing along his family, to live in Barcelona
, Spain for seven years. The international recognition García Márquez earned with the publication of the novel
led to his ability to act as a facilitator
in several negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas, including the former 19th of April Movement
(M-19), and the current FARC and ELN
organizations. 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 notes his relationship with Castro is 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 que anocheza (Before Night Falls
).
Also due to his newfound fame and his outspoken views on U.S. imperialism he was labeled as a subversive and for many years was denied visas by U.S. immigration authorities. However, after Bill Clinton
was elected U.S. president, he finally lifted the travel ban and claimed that García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
was his favorite novel. There is a street in East Los Angeles, CA bearing his name.
when he witnessed the flight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez
. He shares, "it was the first time we had seen a dictator fall in Latin America." 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:
After Autumn of the Patriarch was published the García Márquez's family moved from Barcelona to Mexico City
and García Márquez pledged not to publish again until the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet
was deposed. However, he ultimately published Chronicle of a Death Foretold while Pinochet was still in power as he "could not remain silent in the face of injustice and repression."
The plot of the novel revolves around Santiago Nasar's murder. The narrator acts as a detective, uncovering the events of the murder second by second. Literary critic Ruben Pelayo notes that the story "unfolds in an inverted fashion. Instead of moving forward... the plot moves backwards." In the first chapter, the narrator tells the reader exactly who killed Santiago Nasar and the rest of the book is left to unfold why.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the year before García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel was also adapted into a film by Italian director Francesco Rosi
in 1987.
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. However, as García Márquez explains 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.” The love of old people is based on a newspaper story about the death of two Americans, who were almost 80 years old, who met every year in Acapulco. They were out in a boat one day and were murdered by the boatman with his oars. García Márquez notes, “Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known. I was fascinated by them. They were each married to other people.”
provided by 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." In 2002, three years later, he published Living to Tell the Tale
(Vivir para Contarla), the first volume in a trilogy of memoirs.
In 2000, his impending death was incorrectly reported by Peruvian daily newspaper La República
. The next day other newspapers republished his alleged farewell poem, "La Marioneta" but shortly afterwards García Márquez denied being the author of the poem, which was determined to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist.
's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale
, was published in November 2003. As of March 2008 his most recent novel is 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 pubescent concubine, that was published in October 2004. This book caused controversy in Iran, where it was banned after the initial 5,000 copies were printed and sold.
In May 2008, despite the fact that García Márquez had earlier declared that he "had finished with writing", it was announced that the author was now finishing a new novel, "a novel of love" that had yet to be given a title, to be published by the end of the year. However, in April 2009 his agent, Carmen Balcells, told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera
that García Márquez was unlikely to write again. Since then, in October 2010, that has been recanted by Random House Mondadori editor Cristobal Pera who revealed that García Márquez was completing a new novel called or We'll Meet in August (En agosto nos vemos) that is now awaiting publication.
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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 has a long and involved history with film. He is a film critic, he founded and served as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana, was the Head of the Latin American Film Foundation, and has written several screenplays. For his first script he worked with Carlos Fuentes
on Juan Rulfo's El gallo de oro. His other screenplays include the films Tiempo de morir (1966) and Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988), as well as the television series Amores difíciles (1991).
García Márquez also originally wrote his Eréndira as a third screenplay. However, 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 Littin
'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 November 16, 2007.
His novel Of Love and Other Demons has been adapted and directed by a Costa Rican filmmaker, Hilda Hidalgo, who is a graduate of the Film Institute at Havana where García Márquez frequently imparts screenplay workshops. Hidalgo's film was released in April 2010.
While there are certain aspects readers can almost always expect in García Márquez's writing, like instances of humour, he does not stick to any clear and predetermined style template. In an interview with Marlise Simons, García Márquez noted:
García Márquez is also 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.
In his other works he has 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 has been 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 dichotimizing 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, "'The way you treat reality in your books...has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...' 'This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.'"
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."
. 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 tourdepictsist 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. As well, Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in Macondo and tells the complete history of the fictional town from its founding to its doom.
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:
of literature. 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,
"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 "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."
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
n novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
and journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
in 1982, and is the earliest winner of this prize who is still alive. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
(1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez first published in the Spanish language during 1985. Alfred A. Knopf published the English translation during 1988...
(1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
(the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca
Aracataca
Aracataca is a municipality located in the Department of Magdalena, in Colombia's Caribbean Region. Aracataca is a river town founded in 1885. The town stands beside the river of the same name, the Aracataca river that flows from the nearby Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range into the...
), and most of them express the theme of solitude.
Early life
Aracataca
Aracataca is a municipality located in the Department of Magdalena, in Colombia's Caribbean Region. Aracataca is a river town founded in 1885. The town stands beside the river of the same name, the Aracataca river that flows from the nearby Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range into the...
, Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez. Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist. In January 1929, his parents moved to Sucre
Sucre Department
Sucre is a department in the Caribbean Region of Colombia. The department ranks 27th by area, and it has a population of 772,010, ranking 20th of all the 32 departments of Colombia...
while García Marquez stayed in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. When he was nine, his grandfather died, and he moved to his parents' home in Sucre where his father owned a pharmacy.
When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Marquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (Gabriel Eligio) was a Conservative
Colombian Conservative Party
The Colombian Conservative Party , is a conservative political party in Colombia. The party was unofficially founded by a group of Revolutionary Commoners during the Revolutionary War for Independence from the Spanish Monarchy and later formally established during the Greater Colombia...
, and had the reputation of being a womanizer. Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telegraph 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. Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him. (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez first published in the Spanish language during 1985. Alfred A. Knopf published the English translation during 1988...
).
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", was a Liberal
Colombian Liberal Party
The Colombian Liberal Party is a center-left party in Colombia that adheres to social democracy and social liberalism.The Party was founded in 1848 and, together with the Colombian Conservative Party, subsequently became one of the two main political forces in the country for over a century.After...
veteran of the Thousand Days War
Thousand Days War
The Thousand Days' War , was a civil armed conflict in the newly created Republic of Colombia, between the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and its radical factions. In 1899 the ruling conservatives were accused of maintaining power through fraudulent elections...
. 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 García Márquez was born. The Colonel, whom García Márquez has 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
United Fruit Company
It had a deep and long-lasting impact on the economic and political development of several Latin American countries. Critics often accused it of exploitative neocolonialism and described it as the archetypal example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of the...
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 political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories. In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government." 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."
García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an equally 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. According to García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality". He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
.
Journalism
García Márquez began his career as a journalist while studying law at the University of CartagenaUniversity of Cartagena
The University of Cartagena , also called Unicartagena, is a public, departmental, coeducational, research university based primarily in the city of Cartagena, Bolívar, Colombia...
. In 1948 and 1949 he wrote for El Universal
El Universal (Cartagena)
El Universal is a regional newspaper based in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.Founded by Domingo López Escauriaza and Eduardo Ferrer Ferrer, its first edition went on sale on 8 March 1948...
in Cartagena
Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena de Indias , is a large Caribbean beach resort city on the northern coast of Colombia in the Caribbean Coast Region and capital of Bolívar Department...
. Later, from 1950 until 1952, he wrote a "whimsical" column under the name of "Septimus" for the local paper El Heraldo in Barranquilla
Barranquilla
Barranquilla is an industrial port city and municipality located in northern Colombia, near the Caribbean Sea. The capital of the Atlántico Department, it is the largest industrial city and port in the Colombian Caribbean region with a population of 1,148,506 as of 2005, which makes it Colombia's...
. 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
Barranquilla Group
The Barranquilla Group was the name given to the group of writers, journalists, and philosophers who congregated in the Colombian city of Barranquilla in the middle of the twentieth century; it became one of the most productive intellectual and literary communities of the period.Among the most...
, 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. At this time, García Márquez was also introduced to the works of writers such as Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
. Faulkner's narrative techniques, historical themes and use of rural locations influenced many Latin American authors. The environment of Barranquilla gave García Márquez a world-class literary education and provided him with a unique perspective on Caribbean culture. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and regularly wrote for Bogotá
Bogotá
Bogotá, Distrito Capital , from 1991 to 2000 called Santa Fé de Bogotá, is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is also designated by the national constitution as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca, even though the city of Bogotá now comprises an independent Capital district...
's El Espectador
El Espectador
El Espectador is a newspaper with national circulation within Colombia, founded by Fidel Cano Gutiérrez on 22 March 1887 in Medellín and published since 1915 in Bogotá...
. He was a regular film critic which drove his interest in film.
In 1994, along with his brother Jaime and with lawyer Jaime Abello, he founded the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (New Iberoamerican Journalism Foundation), which aims to help young journalists learn with teachers such as Alma Guillermoprieto
Alma Guillermoprieto
Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.-Life:...
or Jon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson is a biographer, author, international investigative reporter, and staff writer for The New Yorker, reporting from warzone locales such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East. Anderson has also written for The New...
, and to stimulate new ways to do journalism. García Márquez is still the foundation's president.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a series of fourteen 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 shipwreck. The publication of the articles resulted in public controversy, as they discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor.
In response to this controversy El Espectador sent García Márquez away to Europe to be a foreign correspondent. He wrote about his experiences for El Independiente
El Independiente
-Track listing:# Intro # No Hay# Wondering Why# Cemento # Quiero Volver Esta Noche# Abrazo del Oso # En La Distancia # Nena Caliente# Atrevida...
, a newspaper which had briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was a Colombian politician, military officer, General of the Army and President of Colombia between 1953 and 1957.- Biographic data :...
and was later shut down by Colombian authorities. García Márquez's background in journalism provided a foundational base for his writing career. Literary critic Bell-Villada noted, "Owing to his hands on experiences in journalism, García Márquez is, of all the great living authors, the one who is closest to everyday reality."
Marriage and family
García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was in college, they decided to wait for her to finish before getting married. When he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, Mercedes waited for him to return to Barranquilla. They were finally wed in 1958. The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born. In 1961, the family traveled by GreyhoundGreyhound Lines
Greyhound Lines, Inc., based in Dallas, Texas, is an intercity common carrier of passengers by bus serving over 3,700 destinations in the United States, Canada and Mexico, operating under the well-known logo of a leaping greyhound. It was founded in Hibbing, Minnesota, USA, in 1914 and...
bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
. García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
. Three years later the couple's second son, Gonzalo, was born in Mexico. Gonzalo is currently 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 novel take place in one room, during a half-hour period on Wednesday September 12, 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 novel explores the child's first experience with death by following his stream of consciousness. As well, the book reveals the perspective of Isabel, the Colonel's daughter, which provides a feminine point of view.One Hundred Years of Solitude
Since García Márquez was eighteen, he 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 AcapulcoAcapulco
Acapulco is a city, municipality and major sea port in the state of Guerrero on the Pacific coast of Mexico, southwest from Mexico City. Acapulco is located on a deep, semi-circular bay and has been a port since the early colonial period of Mexico’s history...
. 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, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, and he wrote every day for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
by Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College.-Life and career:Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré...
1970). The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they founded the fictional South American village of Macondo
Macondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
, through their trials and tribulations, instances of incest, births and deaths. The history of Macondo is often generalized by critics to represent rural towns throughout Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
or at least near García Márquez's native Aracataca
Aracataca
Aracataca is a municipality located in the Department of Magdalena, in Colombia's Caribbean Region. Aracataca is a river town founded in 1885. The town stands beside the river of the same name, the Aracataca river that flows from the nearby Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range into the...
.
This novel was widely popular and led to García Márquez's Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize
Rómulo Gallegos Prize
The Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize was created on 6 August 1964 by a presidential decree enacted by Venezuelan President Raúl Leoni, in honor of the Venezuelan politician and President Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara....
in 1972. 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. However, García Márquez himself does not completely understand the success of this particular book: "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."
Fame
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, Spain for seven years. The international recognition García Márquez earned with the publication of the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
led to his ability to act as a facilitator
Facilitator
A facilitator is someone who helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them to plan to achieve them without taking a particular position in the discussion...
in several negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas, including the former 19th of April Movement
19th of April Movement
The 19th of April Movement or M-19, was a Colombian guerrilla movement. After its demobilization it became a political party, the M-19 Democratic Alliance , or AD/M-19.The M-19 traced its origins to the allegedly fraudulent presidential elections of 19 April 1970...
(M-19), and the current FARC and ELN
National Liberation Army (Colombia)
National Liberation Army is a revolutionary, avowed Marxist guerrilla group that has been operating in several regions of Colombia since 1964....
organizations. The popularity of his writing also led to friendships with powerful leaders, including one with former Cuban president Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
, 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
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
in what became one of the largest feuds in modern literature. In an interview with Claudia Dreifus in 1982 García Márquez notes his relationship with Castro is 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
Cuban exile
The term "Cuban exile" refers to the many Cubans who have sought alternative political or economic conditions outside the island, dating back to the Ten Years' War and the struggle for Cuban independence during the 19th century...
writer Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright who despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and then rebelled against the Cuban government.- Life :...
, in his 1992 memoir Antes que anocheza (Before Night Falls
Before Night Falls
Before Night Falls is the 1992 autobiography of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, describing his life in Cuba, his time in prison, and his ultimate escape to the United States. It was on The New York Times list of the ten best books of the year 1993...
).
Also due to his newfound fame and his outspoken views on U.S. imperialism he was labeled as a subversive and for many years was denied visas by U.S. immigration authorities. However, after Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
was elected U.S. president, he finally lifted the travel ban and claimed that García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
was his favorite novel. There is a street in East Los Angeles, CA bearing his name.
Autumn of the Patriarch
García Márquez was inspired to write a dictator novelDictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
when he witnessed the flight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez
Marcos Pérez Jiménez
Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez was a soldier and Presidents of Venezuela from 1952 to 1958.-Career:Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez was born in Michelena, Táchira State. His father, Juan Pérez Bustamante, was a farmer; his mother, Adela Jiménez, a schoolteacher...
. He shares, "it was the first time we had seen a dictator fall in Latin America." 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
Dictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
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.
After Autumn of the Patriarch was published the García Márquez's family moved from Barcelona to Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
and García Márquez pledged not to publish again until the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...
was deposed. However, he ultimately published Chronicle of a Death Foretold while Pinochet was still in power as he "could not remain silent in the face of injustice and repression."
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) recreates a murder that took place in Sucre, Colombia in 1951. The character named Santiago Nasar is based on a good friend from García Márquez's childhood, Cayetano Gentile Chimento. Pelayo classifies this novel as a combination of journalism, realism and detective story.The plot of the novel revolves around Santiago Nasar's murder. The narrator acts as a detective, uncovering the events of the murder second by second. Literary critic Ruben Pelayo notes that the story "unfolds in an inverted fashion. Instead of moving forward... the plot moves backwards." In the first chapter, the narrator tells the reader exactly who killed Santiago Nasar and the rest of the book is left to unfold why.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the year before García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel was also adapted into a film by Italian director Francesco Rosi
Francesco Rosi
Francesco Rosi is an Italian film director. He is the father of actress Carolina Rosi.-Biography:After studying Law, but hoping to study film, Rosi entered the industry as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on La Terra trema...
in 1987.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) was first published in 1985. It is considered a non-traditional love story as "lovers find love in their 'golden years'- in their seventies, when death is all around them".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. However, as García Márquez explains 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.” The love of old people is based on a newspaper story about the death of two Americans, who were almost 80 years old, who met every year in Acapulco. They were out in a boat one day and were murdered by the boatman with his oars. García Márquez notes, “Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known. I was fascinated by them. They were each married to other people.”
Illness
In 1999, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. ChemotherapyChemotherapy
Chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with an antineoplastic drug or with a combination of such drugs into a standardized treatment regimen....
provided by 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." In 2002, three years later, he published Living to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale is the first volume of the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez....
(Vivir para Contarla), the first volume in a trilogy of memoirs.
In 2000, his impending death was incorrectly reported by Peruvian daily newspaper La República
La República
La República is a center-left newspaper published in Lima, Peru. It is one of the two main national dailies sold all over the country since it was founded on May 3, 1981. The paper was founded by Gustavo Mohme Llona, a former member of the Peruvian Congress...
. The next day other newspapers republished his alleged farewell poem, "La Marioneta" but shortly afterwards García Márquez denied being the author of the poem, which was determined to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist.
Recent works
In 2002, García Márquez published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. Edith GrossmanEdith Grossman
Edith Grossman is an award-winning American translator specializing in English versions of Spanish language books. She is one of the most important translators of Latin American fiction in the past century, translating the works of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García...
's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale
Living to Tell the Tale is the first volume of the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez....
, was published in November 2003. As of March 2008 his most recent novel is Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Gabriel García Márquez....
(Memoria de mis putas tristes), a love story that follows the romance of a 90-year-old man and a pubescent concubine, that was published in October 2004. This book caused controversy in Iran, where it was banned after the initial 5,000 copies were printed and sold.
In May 2008, despite the fact that García Márquez had earlier declared that he "had finished with writing", it was announced that the author was now finishing a new novel, "a novel of love" that had yet to be given a title, to be published by the end of the year. However, in April 2009 his agent, Carmen Balcells, told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera
La Tercera
La Tercera , formerly known as La Tercera de la Hora , is a daily newspaper published in Santiago, Chile and owned by Copesa. It is El Mercurios closest competitor....
that García Márquez was unlikely to write again. Since then, in October 2010, that has been recanted by Random House Mondadori editor Cristobal Pera who revealed that García Márquez was completing a new novel called or We'll Meet in August (En agosto nos vemos) that is now awaiting publication.
Film
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.-Biography:Fuentes was born in...
on Juan Rulfo's El gallo de oro. His other screenplays include the films Tiempo de morir (1966) and Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988), as well as the television series Amores difíciles (1991).
García Márquez also originally wrote his Eréndira as a third screenplay. However, this version was lost and replaced by the novella. Nonetheless, he worked on rewriting the script in collaboration with Ruy Guerra
Ruy Guerra
Ruy Alexandre Guerra Coelho Pereira is a film director, screenwriter, film editor, and actor in Brazil. Guerra was born a Portuguese citizen in Lourenço Marques in Moçambique, when it was still a colony of Portugal....
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
Francesco Rosi
Francesco Rosi is an Italian film director. He is the father of actress Carolina Rosi.-Biography:After studying Law, but hoping to study film, Rosi entered the industry as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on La Terra trema...
directed the movie Cronaca di una morte annunciata
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (film)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a drama film directed by Francesco Rosi adapted by Tonino Guerra from the eponymous novel by Gabriel García Márquez. It stars Rupert Everett, Ornella Muti, Anthony Delon and Gian Maria Volonté. The film premiered at Cannes film festival in May 1987.-Plot :Cristóbal...
based on Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Several film adaptations have been made in Mexico, including Miguel Littin
Miguel Littin
Miguel Ernesto Littín Cucumides is a Chilean film director, screenwriter, film producer and novelist. He was born to a Palestinian father, Hernán Littin and a Greek mother, Cristina Cucumides....
'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
Mike Newell (director)
Michael Cormac "Mike" Newell is an English director and producer of motion pictures for the screen and for television. After the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, Newell became the third most commercially successful British director in recent years, behind Christopher Nolan...
(Four Weddings and a Funeral
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Four Weddings and a Funeral is a 1994 British comedy film directed by Mike Newell. It was the first of several films by screenwriter Richard Curtis to feature Hugh Grant...
) filmed Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera (film)
Love in the Time of Cholera is a 2007 film directed by Mike Newell. Based on the novel of the same name by Gabriel García Márquez, it tells the story of a love triangle between Fermina Daza and her two suitors, Florentino Ariza and Doctor Juvenal Urbino which spans 50 years, from 1880 to...
in Cartagena
Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena de Indias , is a large Caribbean beach resort city on the northern coast of Colombia in the Caribbean Coast Region and capital of Bolívar Department...
, Colombia, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist
The Pianist (2002 film)
The Pianist is a 2002 biographical war film directed by Roman Polanski, starring Adrien Brody. It is an adaptation of the autobiography of the same name by Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman...
). The film was released in the U.S. on November 16, 2007.
His novel Of Love and Other Demons has been adapted and directed by a Costa Rican filmmaker, Hilda Hidalgo, who is a graduate of the Film Institute at Havana where García Márquez frequently imparts screenplay workshops. Hidalgo's film was released in April 2010.
Style
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 is also 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
No One Writes to the Colonel
No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella written by the Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. It also gives its name to a short story collection.-Plot summary:...
, the main characters are not given names. This practice is influenced by Greek tragedies, such as Antigone
Antigone (Sophocles)
Antigone is a tragedy by Sophocles written in or before 442 BC. Chronologically, it is the third of the three Theban plays but was written first...
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 has 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 has 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
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
. The style of these works fits in the "marvellous realm" described by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
and has been 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 dichotimizing 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, "'The way you treat reality in your books...has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...' 'This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.'"
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 MacondoMacondo
For the oil spill, see: Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosionMacondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.-Aracataca:...
. 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 tourdepictsist 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. As well, Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in Macondo and tells the complete history of the fictional town from its founding to its doom.
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:
The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant...I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the CeibaCeibaCeiba is the name of a genus of many species of large trees found in tropical areas, including Mexico, Central America, South America, The Bahamas, Belize and the Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia...
.
La violencia
In several of García Márquez's works, including No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Leaf Storm, he references 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 living 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". However, although García Márquez does portray the corrupt nature and the injustices of times like la violencia, he refuses 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.Legacy
García Márquez is an important part of the Latin American BoomLatin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
of literature. 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,
Nobel Prize
In 1982, García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in LiteratureNobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
"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 "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."
Novels
- In Evil HourIn Evil HourIn Evil Hour is a novel by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, first published in 1962....
(1962) - One Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
(1967) - The Autumn of the PatriarchThe Autumn of the PatriarchThe Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1975.A "poem on the solitude of power" according to the author, the novel is a flowing tract on the life of an eternal dictator...
(1975) - Love in the Time of CholeraLove in the Time of CholeraLove in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez first published in the Spanish language during 1985. Alfred A. Knopf published the English translation during 1988...
(1985) - The General in His LabyrinthThe General in His LabyrinthThe General in His Labyrinth is a novel by the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia...
(1989)
Novellas
- Leaf StormLeaf StormLeaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García Márquez's novella La Hojarasca. First published in 1955, it took seven years to find a publisher...
(1955) - No One Writes to the ColonelNo One Writes to the ColonelNo One Writes to the Colonel is a novella written by the Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. It also gives its name to a short story collection.-Plot summary:...
(1961) - Chronicle of a Death ForetoldChronicle of a Death ForetoldChronicle of a Death Foretold is a novella by Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1981...
(1981) - Of Love and Other DemonsOf Love and Other DemonsOf Love and Other Demons is a novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, first published in 1994....
(1994) - Memories of My Melancholy WhoresMemories of My Melancholy WhoresMemories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Gabriel García Márquez....
(2004)
Short story collections
- Ojos de Perro Azul (Eyes of a Blue Dog) (1974)
- Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories (1978)
- Collected Stories (1984)
- Strange PilgrimsStrange PilgrimsStrange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez....
(1993) - A Very Old Man With Enormous WingsA Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is a fictional short story by author Gabriel García Márquez written in 1955. It falls within the genre of magic realism, and is one of the short stories included in the book Leaf Storm.-Plot summary:...
(1955)
Non Fiction
- The Story of a Shipwrecked SailorThe Story of a Shipwrecked SailorThe Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is a work of non-fiction by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez...
(1970) - The Solitude of Latin AmericaThe Solitude of Latin AmericaThe Solitude of Latin America is the name of the speech given by Gabriel Garcia Marquez upon receiving his Nobel Prize in literature on December 8, 1982. The Nobel Prize was presented to Marquez by Professor Lars Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy....
(1982) - The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza)
- Clandestine in Chile (1986)
- News of a KidnappingNews of a Kidnappingthumb|1st edition News of a Kidnapping is a non-fiction book by Gabriel García Márquez...
(1996) - A Country for Children (1998)
- Living to Tell the TaleLiving to Tell the TaleLiving to Tell the Tale is the first volume of the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez....
(2002)