Log In


Reset Password
Books

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate, dies

Film director Roman Polanski, left, and Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez speak during the closing ceremony of the Cuban International Film Festival in 2002 in Havana, Cuba. Marquez died Thursday at his home in Mexico City.

MEXICO CITY – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America’s passion, superstition, violence and inequality, died at home in Mexico City around midday Thursday, according to people close to his family. He was 87.

Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works – among them Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch – outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.

His stories made him literature’s best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig’s tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.

His death was confirmed by two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family’s privacy.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was “the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure,” biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press.

When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. 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.”

With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative nonfiction that included the Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor, the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days.

Other pieces profiled Venezuela’s larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, and vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite, in “News of a Kidnapping.” In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.

Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. The man widely known as “Gabo” became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington’s violent interventions from Vietnam to Chile.

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who was also something of a philanderer and fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.

Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez’s father opened a pharmacy, hoping to become rich.

Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia’s loss of the Panamanian isthmus.

His grandparents’ tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez’s fiction and Aracataca became the model for “Macondo,” the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where One Hundred Years of Solitude is set.

“I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born,” Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. “Ever since I could speak.”

Garcia Marquez’s parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore.”

His father insisted he study law, but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious, and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his bedraggled appearance that: “I thought you were a beggar.”

Associated Press writer Frank Bajak reported from Lima, Peru. Paul Haven and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed to this report.

World reacts to death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Reaction to death of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

“A thousand years of loneliness and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” – Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos.

HHH

“On behalf of Mexico, I express my sadness for the death of one the greatest writers of our time: Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” – Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

HHH

“From the time I read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ more than 40 years ago, I was always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought, and emotional honesty ... I was honored to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years.” – former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

HHH

“He is like the Mandela of literature because of the impact that he has had on readers all over the world. His influence is universal, and that is a very rare thing.” – Cristobal Pera, editorial director of Penguin Random House in Mexico.

HHH

“Thank you, master Gabo. Have a tranquil trip and that you always remain alive among us.” – Jaime Abello Banfi, director general of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation.

HHH

“He had the capacity to see stories that many of us have in front of us and don’t even notice. He was unique in that.” – Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramirez Mercado.

HHH

“This guy put Colombia on the map and changed the image of Colombia.” – Enrique Santos Calderon, Colombian president’s brother who was close friend of the writer.

HHH

“In recent times it wasn’t easy to communicate with him, although he understood and continued the conversation. He was always loving and generous and extraordinarily clever.” – Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, director of Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts.

HHH

“Gabo has left us and we will have years of solitude. But his works and his love for the motherland remain. Farewell until the victory, dear Gabo.” – Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.



Reader Comments