GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
(March 6, 1927- April 17, 2014)
Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose One Hundred Years of Solitude established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.
García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers - Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them - who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.
Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America's history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, García Márquez said: "Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, García Márquez felt impelled to speak on political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Castro became a close friend and García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.
No draft had more impact than the one for One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez's editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.
Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorised an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalised from its opening sentences:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."
One Hundred Years of Solitude would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote". García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate One Hundred Years of Solitude, he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers' eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionised by critics and devoured by readers.
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia's Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927, the eldest child of Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Gabriel Elijio García. His father, a postal clerk, telegraph operator and itinerant pharmacist, could barely support his wife and 12 children; Gabriel, the eldest, spent his early childhood living in the large, ramshackle house of his maternal grandparents. The house influenced his writing; it seemed inhabited, he said, by the ghosts his grandmother conjured in the stories she told.
His maternal grandfather, Nicolás Márquez Mejía, a retired army colonel, was also an influence - "the most important figure of my life," García Márquez said. The grandfather bore a marked resemblance to Colonel Buendía, the protagonist of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the book's mythical village of Macondo draws heavily on Aracataca.
García Márquez alternated between journalism and fiction in the late 1950s. From 1959 to 1961 he supported the Castro revolution and wrote for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban press agency.
In 1961, he moved to Mexico City, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life. It was there, in 1965, after a four-year dry spell in which he wrote no fiction, that García Márquez began One Hundred Years of Solitude. The inspiration for it, he said, came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.
Returning home, he began an almost undistracted 18 months of writing while his wife, Mercedes, looked after the household. "When I was finished writing," he recalled, "my wife said: 'Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.' "
With the book's publication in 1967, in Buenos Aires, the family never owed a penny again. One Hundred Years of Solitude was sold out within days.
In following the rise and fall of the Buendía family through several generations of war and peace, affluence and poverty, the novel seemed to many critics and readers the defining saga of Latin America's social and political history.
García Márquez made no claim to have invented magical realism; he pointed out that elements of it had appeared before in Latin American literature. But no one before him had used the style with such artistry, exuberance and power. Magical realism would soon inspire writers on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Isabel Allende in Chile and Salman Rushdie in Britain.
"Reality is also the myths of the common people," García Márquez told an interviewer. "I realised that reality isn't just the police that kill people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people."
In 1973, when General Pinochet overthrew Chile's democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide, García Márquez vowed never to write as long as General Pinochet remained in power.
The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 years, but García Márquez released himself from his vow well before it ended. "I never thought he'd last so long," he said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post. "Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship."
In 1975, he published his next novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, about a dictator in a phantasmagorical Latin American state who rules for decades so that nobody can recall what life was like before him. As he had predicted, some critics faulted the work for not matching the artistry of One Hundred Years of Solitude. But others raved about it, and it became a global best seller. He called it his best novel.
Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, was García Márquez's most romantic novel, the story of the resumption of a passionate relationship between a recently widowed septuagenarian and the lover she had broken with more than 50 years before.
The General in His Labyrinth, published in 1989, combined imagination with historical fact to conjure up the last days of Simón Bolívar, the father of South America's independence from Spain. The portrait of the aging Bolívar as a flatulent philanderer, abandoned and ridiculed by his onetime followers, aroused controversy on a continent that viewed him as South America's version of George Washington. But García Márquez said his depiction had been drawn from a careful perusal of Bolívar's personal letters.
As his fame grew, García Márquez - or Gabo, as he was called by friends - enjoyed a lifestyle he would have found inconceivable in his struggling youth. He kept homes in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Recognisable by his bushy mustache, he dressed fastidiously, preferring a white monotone encompassing linen suits, shirts, shoes and even watchbands.
He contributed his prestige, time and money to left-wing causes. He helped finance a Venezuelan political party. He was a strong defender of the Sandinistas, the leftist revolutionaries who took power in Nicaragua.
For more than three decades the State Department denied García Márquez a visa to travel in the United States, supposedly because he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s but almost certainly because of his continuing espousal of left-wing causes and his friendship with Castro. The ban was rescinded in 1995 after President Bill Clinton invited him to Martha's Vineyard.
He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans' "almost pornographic obsession with Castro." But he got sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents.
After receiving his cancer diagnosis in 1999, García Márquez devoted most of his subsequent writing to his memoirs. One exception was the novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores, about the love affair between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old prostitute, published in 2004.
In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing. Pera, the author's editor at Random House Mondadori, said at the time that García Márquez had been working on a novel, We'll See Each Other in August, but that no publication date had been scheduled. The author seemed disinclined to have it published, Pera said: "He told me, 'This far along I don't need to publish more.' "
Besides his wife, Mercedes, his survivors include two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
