Gabriel García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature.
Connections
Son: Gonzalo García
2007
Gabriel García Márquez (center) and his sons, Gonzalo Garcia Barcha (left) and film and television director Rodrigo Garcia Barcha, in Los Angeles, California.
Son: Rodrigo García
2010
García Márquez's son, Rodrigo García Barcha receives the Guadalajara Award during the Guadalajara International Film Festival.
(In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a ...)
In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal. Translated by Randolf Hogan.
(Leaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García M...)
Leaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García Márquez's novella La Hojarasca. Widely celebrated as the first appearance of Macondo, the fictitious village later made famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Leaf Storm is a testing ground for many of the themes and characters later immortalized in said book. Spanish Edition.
(One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise...)
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women - brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul - this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
(In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall pa...)
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
(General Simon Bolivar, "the Liberator" of five South Amer...)
General Simon Bolivar, "the Liberator" of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war and politics, he still dances with such enthusiasm and skill that his witnesses cannot believe he is ill. Aflame with memories of the power that he commanded and the dream of continental unity that eluded him, he is a moving exemplar of how much can be won - and lost - in a life.
(In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin...)
In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.
(On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of...)
On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport – is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love – and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
(In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo ...)
In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar – head of the Medellín drug cartel – kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, García Márquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. He also depicts the keening ache of Colombia after nearly forty years of rebel uprisings, right-wing death squads, currency collapse and narco-democracy. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language and journalistic rigor, García Márquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.
(No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabri...)
No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel García Márquez. In this autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life from his birth in1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
(On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides t...)
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known.
(
Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez...)
Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes.
Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose works earned him the reputation of being the greatest writer of Castilian in Spain and Latin America. His "One Hundred Years of Solitude" established him as perhaps the leading contemporary figure in Latin American fiction.
Background
Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracata, Magdalena, Colombia; the son of Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. His parents spent the first eight years of his life with his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, a veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez. Thus Gabriel was raised by his grandparents, who taught him the legends, folklore, and language of the region.
Education
García Márquez took his first years of high school in the Colegio jesuita San José (today Instituto San José) from 1940. He continued his education at the Liceo Nacional of Zipaquira, where he would finish his secondary studies in 1946.
In 1947 García Márquez enrolled in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá to study law. After the so-called "Bogotazo" in 1948, some bloody disturbances that happened 9 April caused by the assassination of popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed and García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. Though García Márquez never finished his higher studies (he ended his legal studies in 1950), some universities, like Columbia University, New York, have given him an honorary doctorate in writing.
In 1946 Garcia started working as a newspaper editor for El Universal in Cartagena. In 1948 he moved to Barranquilla, where he was editor of El Heraldo until 1952. Then he became editor of the liberal newspaper El Espectador in Bogota during repressive eras of the conservative dictators Laureano Gomez and his successor, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.
In December 1957, García Márquez accepted a position in Caracas in the magazine Momento directed by his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. In May 1958, disagreeing with the owner of Momento, he resigned. In the early '60s he worked in New York City for Prensa Latina, the news service created by the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Between 1955 and 1960 several short stories and a novella had begun to establish García Márquez's fame in the Spanish-speaking world. La hojarasca (1955), a short novel, is set, like his later works, in the mythical town of Macondo in the swampy coastal area of northeastern Colombia known as the Cienaga. The story reflects the changes the 20th century brought in the life of this sleepy country town.
Much of García Márquez's work centers on funerals. In La hojarasca mourners who knew the dead man in life contemplate the past, each from his own point of view. In three monologues these persons - an old colonel, his daughter Isabel, and Isabel's son - tell their story. The dead man, a doctor and former friend of the colonel, had committed suicide. The narrators do not entirely explain the motives of the suicide, but in the course of each story much of the past history of the village of Macondo is revealed. A strong premonition of imminent, relentless, and inevitable doom for Macondo permeates the novel.
Macondo and the Buendia family were further developed in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; Nobody Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories). The next short stories, Los funerales de la Mama Grande (1962), strengthened the growing reputation of García Márquez.
The publication of Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude) constituted something of a literary phenomenon when it sold over 100, 000 copies in 15 editions in Buenos Aires in 1969. The story of Cien años de soledad depicts the rise and fall of a village as seen in the lives of five generations of one family - an almost biblical pentateuch - ending appropriately with flood and drought, climaxed by cyclonic winds of final destruction, which comes as the last living Buendia deciphers the ancient prophecies of doom and learns that "races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." The setting of this novel is a microcosm for Colombia, and through extension, both South America and the rest of the world. Pablo Neruda, the most famous Chilean poet, called Cien años de soledad, "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." This novel is generally considered García Márquez's masterpiece.
García Márquez considered his next novel, El otono del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch), "a perfect integration of journalism and literature." García Márquez continued to write novels, short stories, essays, and film scripts. In 1983, he wrote the film script Erendira adapted from his 1972 novella La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y su abuela desalmada (Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother).
García Márquez's other famous novel, El amor en los tiempos del colera (Love in the Time of Cholera) was written in 1985 (with an English translation published in 1988). This novel is an exploration of the manifestations of love and the relationship between aging, death, and decay. After Cholera he published the novels El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992; Strange Pilgrims, 1993), and Love and Other Demons (1994).
In 1996 García Márquez published a journalistic chronicle of drug-related kidnappings in his native Colombia, Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping). After being diagnosed with cancer in 1999, García Márquez wrote the memoir Vivir para contarla (2002; Living to Tell the Tale), which focuses on his first 30 years. He returned to fiction with Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of My Melancholy Whores), a novel about a lonely man who finally discovers the meaning of love when he hires a virginal prostitute to celebrate his 90th birthday.
(No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabri...)
2002
Politics
García Márquez was a "committed Leftist" throughout his life, adhering to socialist beliefs. García Márquez supported Fidel Castro, praising his achievements of the Cuban Revolution, but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften (the) roughest edges" of the country.
Views
The themes of reality, solitude, and death run through much of García Márquez's works. 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. Throughout all of his novels there are also subtle references to la violencia. For example, characters live under various unjust situations like curfew, press censorship, and underground newspapers.
Quotations:
"The best story is not always the first one but rather the one that is told better."
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
"It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment."
"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
"Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love."
"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."
"There is always something left to love."
"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry."
"Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no."
"Nothing in this world was more difficult than love."
"Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
Membership
Marquez was a 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.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
In 1999 García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, which went into remission after chemotherapy. 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 died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City.
Quotes from others about the person
"Master Garcia Marquez, thanks forever, millions of people on the planet fell in love with our nation fascinated with your lines." - Alvaro Uribe Velez
"Chiselled stateliness and colorful felicities...distinguish everything García Márquez composes." - John Updike
"The familiar García Márquez world [is] a mixture of phantasmagoria and a realism whose truths seem as incredible and strange as the moments of demonic magic." - A.S. Byatt
"The whimsy and the magic are earned, it seems to me—which is to say that García Márquez starts off running on solid ground and simply takes off." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
"What Márquez is showing us all the time is the humanising power of the imagination. In all his writing, the imagination is no mere whimsy, nor a Latin-American eccentricity: it is a way of survival, as we say nowadays." - Alastair Reid
"The biggest hero that Latin America has ever had. He did more for us than Bolivar, Martí, and Sandino. [He united us] in a recognizable identity." - Gioconda Belli
"Everything he wrote was gold….I wish I’d translated everything he ever wrote." - Edith Grossman
"No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez." - Laila Lalami
"You haven't lived until you read at least one novel or short story by Gabriel García Márquez. He helped open an emotional aperture." - Terry McMillan
"I read One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time in high school. You know how some books break your world to remake it?" - Jesmyn Ward
"Love in the Time of Cholera I read at the city pool where I was a lifeguard. It made the world seem huge & the possibilities for love deep." - Maile Meloy
Connections
In 1958 García Márquez married Mercedes Barcha. Their first son, Rodrigo Garcia was born in 1959. The couple's second son, Gonzalo, was born in Mexico in 1964.
Gabriel García Márquez: A Biography
Master of magic realism, distinguished journalist and film critic, friend of world leaders ranging from Fidel Castro to Pres. Bill Clinton, Gabriel García Márquez improbably emerged from obscure beginnings to become an author more beloved of readers worldwide than any other living writer. His plots and protean characters plunge readers into the world of fable, yet their universal appeal, as this biography shows, is deeply rooted in the particularity of García Márquez's own idiosyncratic early life and his later wide travels, all undertaken with the restless curiosity and zest for life that he manages to evoke in his readers.
2008
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
In this exhaustive and enlightening biography - nearly two decades in the making - Gerald Martin dexterously traces the life and times of one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary titans, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez.