García Má

views updated May 18 2018

Gabriel Jose García Márquez: 1928: Author, journalist





One of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century, Gabriel García Márquez was a key figure in the Latin American literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was read throughout the world, selling millions of copies and introducing enthusiastic readers across the globe to the genre of "magical realism." A prolific journalist as well as a novelist and short story writer, García Márquez has reported from several world capitals and remained active through the 1990s as publisher of the Colombian news magazine Cambio.

A Childhood Steeped in Myth


García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town on the Caribbean coast to which his mother's family had moved after her father, Colonel Nicolas Marquez Mejfa, had killed a man in a duel. The oldest child of 11 siblings, García Márquez grew up in Aracataca with his maternal grandparents, who nurtured the budding writer's imagination with fascinating stories of local history and family events. The Colonel reminisced frequently about his youth during the country's civil wars, while the boy's grandmother, who claimed to converse with ghosts and spirits, recounted family legends and became the boy's "source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality," as García Márquez described it in a New York Times Book Review piece quoted in Dictionary of Hispanic Biography.

Among the more memorable family stories was that of García Márquez's parents' courtship. "This history of their forbidden love was one of the wonders of my youth," he wrote in "Seranade," a piece published in New Yorker. So impassioned were his parents' accounts of the affair, he observed, that when he attempted to write about the subject in his novel Love in the Time of Cholera "I couldn't distinguish between life and poetry." It was the Colonel who disapproved of Gabriel Eligio Garcia as a suitor for his daughter, Luisa Santiaga; the young telegraph operator had a reputation as a womanizer and had been born out of wedlock to a fourteen-year-old girl who went on to have six other children by three different men. "It is surprising that Colonel Marquez was so disquieted by this irregular conduct," García Márquez wrote, "when the Colonel himself had fathered, in addition to his three official children, nine more by different mothers, both before and after his marriage, and all of them were welcomed by his wife as if they were her own." Gabriel Eligio Garcia was also a political conservativethe party against whom the Colonel had fought in the civil warsand had few financial prospects. After a passionate courtship that included violin serenades, exile, and even the purchase of a revolver by which Gabriel Eligio Garcia hoped to protect himself from the Colonel's wrath, the couple eloped. When Luisa Santiaga announced her first pregnancy, however, her parents welcomed her and her husband back to Aracataca, where the writer was born in his grandparents' house. García Márquez grew up with ten younger siblings and also has several half siblings from his father's extramarital affairs.

At a Glance . . .


Born March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia; son of Gabriel Eligio Garcia (a telegraph operator) and Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran; married Mercedes Barcha, 1958; children: two sons. Education: Universidad nacional de Colombia, 1947-48; Universidad de Cartagena, 1948-49.


Career: Began career as a journalist, 1947; reporter for Universal, Cartegena, Colombia, late 1940s, El heraldo, Baranquilla, Colombia, 1950-52, and El espectador, Bogota, Colombia, until 1955; freelance journalist in Paris, London, and Caracas, Venezuela, 1956-58; worked for Momento magazine, Caracas, 1958-59; helped form Prensa Latina news agency, Bogota, 1959, and worked as its correspondent in Havana, Cuba, and New York City, 1961; writer, 1965; Fundacion Habeas, founder, 1979, president, 1979.


Memberships: American Academy of Arts and Letters (honorary fellow).


Awards: Colombian Association of Writers and Artists Award, 1954; Premio Literario Esso (Colombia), 1961; Chianciano Award (Italy), 1969; Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger (France); 1969, Romulo Gallegos prize (Venezuela), 1971; honorary doctorate, Columbia University, 1971; Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1972; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1982; Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, 1988; Serfin Prize, 1989.


Address: Home P.O. Box 20736, Mexico City D.F., Mexico.

When García Márquez was seven, his grandfather died and the boy returned to his parents in Bogota, the country's capital. During his adolescence the boy developed a love of literature, with such works as Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" inspiring him to dream of becoming a writer. First, though, he planned to obtain a law degree. He entered the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1947, the same year he published his first short story in El Espectador. In 1948 the country erupted in violence after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and the university was damaged by fire and subsequently closed. García Márquez then transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. There he began writing journalistic pieces for El Universal, and also met Ramon Vinyes, who introduced him to the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. García Márquez abandoned his legal studies in 1949 and moved back to the Caribbean region, to the town of Barranquilla.


Success as a Journalist


During his two years in Barranquilla, García Márquez worked for El heraldo, the local paper, writing a regular column that included short stories, fragments, and essays about current issues. He then moved on to a job as correspondent for the Bogota paper El Espectador, writing film criticism and investigative reports. In the mid-1950s García Márquez moved to Europe, an environment he considered more amenable to his leftist political views than was the regime in his native country. In Paris, where he was based, he continued reporting for El Espectador and also for another Colombian paper, El Independiente. He also continued to write fiction, publishing his first novel, Leaf Storm, in 1955 and completing the novel El coronel no tiene quien le escriba in 1957. Though he sometimes lived in poverty during these years, particularly after the Colombian government shut down El Independiente and left him without a regular income, García Márquez later noted that his European exile was worthwhile for the fresh perspective it gave him on Latin America.


In 1957 the young journalist moved back to Latin America to help a friend, Plinio Apuleye Mendoza, edit the weekly magazine Momento in Caracas, Venezuela. The following year, García Márquez returned to Barranquilla to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, the daughter of a local pharmacist. Soon afterward, García Márquez and Mendoza resigned from Momento to protest its tacit support of U.S. foreign policy. The pair traveled to Cuba to document the aftermath of Castro's revolution, and signed on with the new government's news agency, Prensa Latina, to establish branch offices in Bogota and eventually in New York City. In 1961 García Márquez quit Prensa Latina and moved to Mexico City, where he managed to support his family by writing screenplays and doing editorial and advertising work.

Wrote Critically Acclaimed Novel


Though García Márquez continued a steady production of novellas and short stories during these years, he did not achieve prominence as a writer of fiction until the publication in 1967 of his landmark novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Based on the author's childhood memories of Aracataca, the novel recounts the founding of the fictional town of Macondo by Jose Arcadio Buendia, and its subsequent rise and fall through several generations from the 1820s to the 1920s. Blending historical events with surrealism and fantasy, the novel includes such characters as Colonel Aureliano Buendia, fomentor of 32 political rebellions and father of 17 illegitimate sons; matriarch Ursula Buendia, who witnesses the town's eventual decline; and the old gypsy scribe, Melquiades, whose mysterious manuscripts are revealed as the novel's text. The complex saga of Macondo and the Buendias, many critics noted, suggests the labyrinthine history of Latin America itself.


The novel caused an immediate sensation, selling out its entire first Spanish printing within one week. So heavy was demand for the book that its publisher could scarcely keep enough copies in print. Critics hailed it as a monumental achievement; Chilean Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda was quoted in Time as calling the book "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide and to be translated into more than 30 languages. It is widely considered the most popular and influential example of magical realism, a literary style that incorporates supernatural or surreal elements within a realistic narrative. As Faulkner had done with the American South, García Márquez had created in Macondo a world of mythic dimensions.


The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude enabled García Márquez to focus full-time on his own writing. In 1975 he published the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about a tyrant who has held political power for so long that no one can remember his predecessor. After that, however, he vowed not to release any additional fiction until Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was removed from office. Though Pinochet was not ousted until 1989, García Márquez published the novel Cronica de una meuerte anunciada in 1982. Considered by some critics to be the author's best work, it tells the story of brothers who plot to kill their sister's husband when, after discovering on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he returns her to her family.


Won Nobel Prize


In 1982 García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in bestowing the prize, cited not only the author's narrative gifts but also his demonstrated commitment to social justice. Indeed, the problems of poverty and oppression were the theme of the laureate's acceptance speech. Citing figures that documented thousands of violent deaths and millions of involuntary exiles linked to the political turmoil in Latin America during the 1970s, García Márquez commented that the reality of his native continent nourished in him an "insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty," and made it necessary for Latin Americans to "ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable." Implying that Latin America's cultural remoteness has made it difficult for European and North American countries to sympathize with the leftist political agendas of many of its inhabitants, he went on to ask "Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?"

Criticizing wealthy countries that have "accumulated powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune," García Márquez ended on a note of hope: "We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."


Special Access to World Leaders


García Márquez decided to use his Nobel Prize money to start a newspaper. Yet that venture never materialized, because the author was not satisfied that the independent editorial voice he sought would be respected. Sixteen years later, however, he realized his dream to go back to journalism when he bought the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio in 1999. "Journalism is the only trade that I like," he commented in the New York Times, "and I have always regarded myself as a journalist." The magazine had been struggling, but after García Márquez's purchase its circulation and ad revenues skyrocketed. The writer's international prominence, many observers noted, allowed him access to world leaders who were not always eager to speak to other reporters. "Anyone he calls will pick up the phone," said his American editor, Ash Green, in an Associated Press article. Among the friends and associates about whom García Márquez has written in Cambio are Cuban president Fidel Castro, Colombian industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo, and U.S. President Bill Clinton, who had once impressed the writer by reciting long passages of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury by heart. When Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, García Márquez defended the president, according to New York Times reporter Larry Rohter, by asking "Is it fair that this rare example of the human species must squander his historic destiny just because he couldn't find a safe place to make love?"

García Márquez's reentry into journalism was not without significant risks. Unlike the more neutral American press, the Colombian media take "a strong position in defense of a democratic state rather than observing from an impartial perch," as Washington Post writer Scott Wilson pointed out. "Reporting in Colombia, particularly by Colombians," Wilson noted, "has long been a perilous vocation. But mounting violence, combined with the weakness of public institutions and the blurry line between journalism and advocacy in a country at war with itself, have increasingly placed journalists high on the list of targets." In the first ten months of 2001, nine journalist were killed in Colombia and dozens received death threats. Despite such dangers, García Márquez continued actively reporting on his country's decades-long war between Marxist guerillas and government forces, as well as on controversial issues in other parts of Latin America.

Among García Márquez's political books from this period are Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, a nonfiction account of filmmaker Littin's return to Pinochet's Chile after a period of self-imposed exile. The Chilean government, outraged by the book's content, ordered some 15,000 copies of it burned. In 1997 García Márquez published News of a Kidnapping, based on his investigation of Colombian drug cartels and their destructive influence on that nation's social fabric. "News of a Kidnapping not only provides a fascinating anatomy of 'one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than 20 years,'" wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, "but also offers the reader new insights into the surreal history of Mr. García Márquez's native country. Indeed, the reader is reminded by this book that the magical realism employed by Mr. García Márquez and other Latin American novelists is in part a narrative strategy for grappling with a social reality so hallucinatory, so irrational that it defies ordinary naturalistic description."

Through the 1980s and 1990s, García Márquez continued to strengthen his reputation as a literary master with publication of the novels Love in the Time of Cholera, based partially on the story of his parents' courtship; The General in His Labyrinth, a fictional account of the final months in the life of nineteenth-century South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar; and Of Love and Other Demons, inspired by the author's recollection of a tomb excavation he had witnessed in 1949, when a centuries-old skeleton of a young girl was discovered with living hair flowing from the skull. García Márquez used this image to create the character of Sierva Maria De Todos Los Angeles, a girl in touch with both the Spanish and the African legacies of her Caribbean heritage. When she is bitten by a mad dog, the area bishop orders an exorcism, but the priest charged with performing the rite falls in love with the girl. As with many of García Márquez's earlier novels, Of Love and Other Demons was hailed for its symbolic commentary on Latin American history. As Times Literary Supplement contributor Michael Kerrigan observed, "To excavate the historic vault in which his people lie buried is, for García Márquez, an act not of desecration but of liberation."

Since the summer of 1999, when he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, García Márquez has lived in relative seclusion, focusing his attention on completing a planned three-volume memoir. He was quoted in a CNN.com report as hailing his diagnosis as an "enormous stroke of luck" that forced him to put aside less urgent projects. The first volume of the memoir will cover the author's family background and his early life. The second will focus on his writing career, and the third will examine his relationships with world leaders.


Selected Writings


Fiction


La hojarasca (novel; title means "Leaf Storm"), Ediciones Sipa, 1955.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (novella), Aguirre Editor, 1961, translated as No One Writes to the Colonel, Harper & Row, 1968.

Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (short stories), Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, 1962.

Cien años de soledad (novel), Editorial Sudamericana, 1967, translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Harper & Row, 1970.

Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (novella), Editorial Estuario, 1967.

No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1968.

Ojos de perro azul (short stories), Equisditorial, 1972.

Leaf Storm and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1972.

El otoño del patriarca (novel), Plaza & Janes Editores, 1975, translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch, Harper & Row, 1976.

Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez: 1947-1972 (collected short stories), Plaza & Janés Editores, 1975.

Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1978.

Dos novelas de Macondo, Casa de las Americas, 1980.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada (novel), La Oveja Negra, 1981, translated as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Knopf, 1983.

Viva Sandino (play), Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1982.

Eréndira (filmscript), Les Films du Triangle, 1983.

Collected Stories, Harper & Row, 1984.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera (novel), Oveja Negra, 1985, translated as Love in the Time of Cholera, Knopf, 1988.

A Time to Die (filmscript), ICA Cinema, 1988.

Diatribe of Love against a Seated Man (play, first produced at Cervantes Theater, Buenos Aires, 1988), Arango Editores, 1994.

El general en su labertino (novel), Mondadori, 1989, translated as The General in His Labyrinth, Knopf, 1990.

Collected Novellas, HarperCollins, 1990.

Doce cuentos peregrinos, Mondadori, 1992, translated as Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, Knopf, 1993.

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: A Tale for Children, Creative Education, 1993.

Del amor y otros demonios (novel), Mondador, 1994, translated as Of Love and Other Demons, Knopf, 1995.


Nonfiction


(With Mario Vargas Llosa) La novela en America Latina: Dialogo, Carlos Milla Batres, 1968.

Relato de un naufrago (journalistic pieces), Tusquets Editor, 1970, translated as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Knopf, 1986.

Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (journalistic pieces), Ediciones El Ojo de Camello, 1973.

Cronicas y reportajes (journalistic pieces), Oveja Negra, 1978.

(Contributor) Los sandanistas, Oveja Negra, 1979.

(Contributor) Asi es Caracas, edited by Soledad Mendoza, Editorial Ateneo de Caracas, 1980.

El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (interviews), Oveja Negra, 1982, translated as The Fragrance of Guava, 1983.

(With Guillermo Nolasco-Juarez) Persecucion y muerte de minorias: dos perspectivas, Juarez Editor, 1984.

(Contributor) La Democracia y la paz en America Latina, Editorial El Buho, 1986.

Primeros reportajes, Consorcio de Ediciones Capriles, 1990.

(Author of introduction) An Encounter with Fidel: An Interview, by Gianni Mina, Ocean Press, 1991.

Elogio de la utopia: Una entrevista de Nahuel Maciel, Cronista Ediciones, 1992.

News of a Kidnapping, Knopf, 1997.

(With Reynaldo Gonzales) Cubano 100%, Charta, 1998.

Sources

Books


Bell, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity, St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Bell-Villada, Gene H., García Márquez: The Man and His Work, University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Volume 82, Gale, 1999.

Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, Gale, 1996.

Dolan, Sean, Gabriel García Márquez, Chelsea House, 1994.

Fiddian, Robin W., García Márquez, Longman, 1995.

Janes, Regina, Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland, University of Missouri Press, 1981.

McGuirk, Bernard and Richard Cardwell, editors, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

McMurray, George R., Gabriel García Márquez, Ungar, 1977.

Wood, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cambridge University Press, 1990.


Periodicals


New York Times, June 19, 1997; March 3, 1999.

New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1968; March 8, 1970; February 20, 1972; October 31, 1976; July 16, 1978; September 16, 1978; November 11, 1979; November 16, 1980; December 5, 1982; March 27, 1983; April 7, 1985; April 27, 1986; August 9, 1987; April 10, 1988; September 16, 1990, pp. 1, 30; May 28, 1995, p. 8; June 15, 1997.

New Yorker, February 19-26, 2001.

Time, March 16, 1970; November 1, 1976; July 10, 1978; November 1, 1982; March 7, 1983; December 31, 1984; April 14, 1986; May 22, 1995; June 2, 1997, p. 79.

Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1995.

Washington Post, October 14, 2001, p. A28.

World Literature Today, Winter 1982; Winter 1991, p. 85; Autumn 1993, pp. 782-783.


On-line


CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news (December 11, 2000).

Nobel e-Museum, http://www.nobel.se/literature/


Elizabeth Shostak

García Márquez, Gabriel

views updated May 29 2018

Gabriel García Márquez

Author and journalist

Born Gabriel José García Márquez, March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia; son of Gabriel Eligio Garcia (a telegraph operator) and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguaran; married Mercedes Barcha Pardo, 1958; children: two sons. Education: Attended Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1947-48; attended Universidad de Cartagena, 1948-49.

Addresses: Home—P.O. Box 20736, Mexico City D.F., Mexico.

Career

Began career as a journalist, 1947; reporter for Universal, Cartegena, Colombia, late 1940s, El heraldo, Baranquilla, Colombia, 1950-52, and El espectador, Bogota, Colombia, until 1955; freelance journalist in Paris, London, and Caracas, Venezuela, 1956-57; worked for Momento magazine, Caracas, 1957-59; helped form Prensa Latina news agency, Bogota, 1959, and worked as its correspondent in Havana, Cuba, and New York City, 1961; writer, 1965—; Fundacion Habeas, founder, 1979, president, 1979—; bought Cambio newsmagazine, 1999.

Awards: Colombian Association of Writers and Artists Award, 1954; Premio Literario Esso (Colombia), 1961; Chianciano Award (Italy), 1969; Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger (France); 1969, Romulo Gallegos prize (Venezuela), 1971; honorary doctorate, Columbia University, 1971; Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1972; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1982; Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, 1988; Serfin Prize, 1989.

Sidelights

One of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century, Gabriel García Márquez was a key figure in the Latin American literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was read throughout the world, selling millions of copies and introducing enthusiastic readers across the globe to the genre of "magical realism." A prolific journalist as well as a novelist and short story writer, García Márquez has reported from several world capitals and remained active through the 1990s as publisher of the Colombian news magazine Cambio.

García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town on the Caribbean coast to which his mother's family had moved after her father, Colonel Nicolas Marquez Mejfa, had killed a man in a duel. The oldest child of eleven siblings, García Márquez grew up in Aracataca with his maternal grandparents, who nurtured the budding writer's imagination with fascinating stories of local history and family events. The Colonel reminisced frequently about his youth during the country's civil wars, while the boy's grandmother, who claimed to converse with ghosts and spirits, recounted family legends and became the boy's "source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality," as García Márquez described it in a New York Times Book Review article.

Among the more memorable family stories was that of García Márquez's parents' courtship. "This history of their forbidden love was one of the wonders of my youth," he wrote in "Seranade," a piece published in the New Yorker. So impassioned were his parents' accounts of the affair, he observed, that when he attempted to write about the subject in his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, "I couldn't distinguish between life and poetry." It was the Colonel who disapproved of Gabriel Eligio Garcia as a suitor for his daughter, Luisa Santiaga; the young telegraph operator had a reputation as a womanizer and had been born out of wedlock to a 14-year-old girl who went on to have six other children by three different men. "It is surprising that Colonel Marquez was so disquieted by this irregular conduct," García Márquez wrote, "when the Colonel himself had fathered, in addition to his three official children, nine more by different mothers, both before and after his marriage, and all of them were welcomed by his wife as if they were her own." Gabriel Eligio Garcia was also a political conservative—the party against whom the Colonel had fought in the civil wars—and had few financial prospects. After a passionate courtship that included violin serenades, exile, and even the purchase of a revolver by which Gabriel Eligio Garcia hoped to protect himself from the Colonel's wrath, the couple eloped. When Luisa Santiaga announced her first pregnancy, however, her parents welcomed her and her husband back to Aracataca, where the writer was born in his grandparents' house. García Márquez grew up with ten younger siblings and also has several half siblings from his father's extramarital affairs.

When García Márquez was seven, his grandfather died and the boy returned to his parents in Bogota, the country's capital. During his adolescence the boy developed a love of literature, with such works as Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" inspiring him to dream of becoming a writer. First, though, he planned to obtain a law degree. He entered the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1947, the same year he published his first short story in El Espectador. In 1948 the country erupted in violence after the assassination of reformist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and the university was damaged by fire and subsequently closed. García Márquez then transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. There he began writing journalistic pieces for El Universal, and also met Ramon Vinyes, who introduced him to the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. García Márquez abandoned his legal studies in 1949 and moved back to the Caribbean region, to the town of Barranquilla.

During his two years in Barranquilla, García Márquez worked for El heraldo, the local paper, writing a regular column that included short stories, fragments, and essays about current issues. He then moved on to a job as correspondent for the Bogota paper El Espectador, writing film criticism and investigative reports. In the mid-1950s García Márquez moved to Europe, an environment he considered more amenable to his leftist political views than the regime in his native country. In Paris, where he was based, he continued reporting for El Espectador and also for another Colombian paper, El Independiente. He also continued to write fiction, publishing his first novel, Leaf Storm, in 1955 and completing the novel El coronel no tiene quien le escriba in 1957. Though he sometimes lived in poverty during these years, particularly after the Colombian government shut down El Independiente and left him without a regular income, García Márquez later noted that his European exile was worthwhile for the fresh perspective it gave him on Latin America.

In 1957 the young journalist moved back to Latin America to help a friend, Plinio Apuleye Mendoza, edit the weekly magazine Momento in Caracas, Venezuela. The following year, García Márquez returned to Barranquilla to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, the daughter of a local pharmacist. Soon afterward, García Márquez and Mendoza resigned from Momento to protest its tacit support of U.S. foreign policy. The pair traveled to Cuba to document the aftermath of Castro's revolution, and signed on with the new government's news agency, Prensa Latina, to establish branch offices in Bogota and eventually in New York City. In 1961 García Márquez quit Prensa Latina and moved to Mexico City, where he managed to support his family by writing screenplays and doing editorial and advertising work.

Though García Márquez continued a steady production of novellas and short stories during these years, he did not achieve prominence as a writer of fiction until the publication in 1967 of his landmark novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Based on the author's childhood memories of Aracataca, the novel recounts the founding of the fictional town of Macondo by Jose Arcadio Buendia, and its subsequent rise and fall through several generations from the 1820s to the 1920s. Blending historical events with surrealism and fantasy, the novel includes such characters as Colonel Aureliano Buendia, fomentor of 32 political rebellions and father of 17 illegitimate sons; matriarch Ursula Buendia, who witnesses the town's eventual decline; and the old gypsy scribe, Melquiades, whose mysterious manuscripts are revealed as the novel's text. The complex saga of Macondo and the Buendias, many critics noted, suggests the labyrinthine history of Latin America itself.

The novel caused an immediate sensation, selling out its entire first Spanish printing within one week. So heavy was demand for the book that its publisher could scarcely keep enough copies in print. Critics hailed it as a monumental achievement; Chilean Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda was quoted in Time as calling the book "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide and to be translated into more than 30 languages. It is widely considered the most popular and influential example of magical realism, a literary style that incorporates supernatural or surreal elements within a realistic narrative. As Faulkner had done with the American South, García Márquez had created in Macondo a world of mythic dimensions.

The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude enabled García Márquez to focus full-time on his own writing. In 1975 he published the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about a tyrant who has held political power for so long that no one can remember his predecessor. After that, however, he vowed not to release any additional fiction until Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was removed from office. Though Pinochet was not ousted until 1989, García Márquez published the novel Crónica de una meuerte anunciada in 1981. Considered by some critics to be the author's best work, it tells the story of brothers who plot to kill their sister's husband when, after discovering on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he returns her to her family.

In 1982 García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in bestowing the prize, cited not only the author's narrative gifts but also his demonstrated commitment to social justice. Indeed, the problems of poverty and oppression were the theme of the laureate's acceptance speech. Citing figures that documented thousands of violent deaths and millions of involuntary exiles linked to the political turmoil in Latin America during the 1970s, García Márquez commented that the reality of his native continent nourished in him an "insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty," and made it necessary for Latin Americans to "ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable." Implying that Latin America's cultural remoteness has made it difficult for European and North American countries to sympathize with the leftist political agendas of many of its inhabitants, he went on to ask, "Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?"

Criticizing wealthy countries that have "accumulated powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune," García Márquez ended on a note of hope: "We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

García Márquez decided to use his Nobel Prize money to start a newspaper. Yet that venture never materialized, because the author was not satisfied that the independent editorial voice he sought would be respected. More than a decade later, however, he realized his dream to go back to journalism when he bought the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio in 1999. "Journalism is the only trade that I like," he commented in the New York Times, "and I have always regarded myself as a journalist." The magazine had been struggling, but after García Márquez's purchase its circulation and ad revenues skyrocketed. The writer's international prominence, many observers noted, allowed him access to world leaders who were not always eager to speak to other reporters. "Anyone he calls will pick up the phone," said his American editor, Ash Green, in an Associated Press article. Among the friends and associates about whom García Márquez has written in Cambio are Cuban president Fidel Castro, Colombian industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo, and U.S. President Bill Clinton, who had once impressed the writer by reciting long passages of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury by heart. When Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, García Márquez defended the president, according to New York Times reporter Larry Rohter, by asking "Is it fair that this rare example of the human species must squander his historic destiny just because he couldn't find a safe place to make love?"

García Márquez's reentry into journalism was not without significant risks. Unlike the more neutral American press, the Colombian media take "a strong position in defense of a democratic state rather than observing from an impartial perch," as Washington Post writer Scott Wilson pointed out. "Reporting in Colombia, particularly by Colombians," Wilson noted, "has long been a perilous vocation. But mounting violence, combined with the weakness of public institutions and the blurry line between journalism and advocacy in a country at war with itself, have increasingly placed journalists high on the list of targets." In the first ten months of 2001, nine journalists were killed in Colombia and dozens received death threats. Despite such dangers, García Márquez continued actively reporting on his country's decades-long war between Marxist guerillas and government forces, as well as on controversial issues in other parts of Latin America.

Among García Márquez's political books from this period are Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, a nonfiction account of filmmaker Littin's return to Pinochet's Chile after a period of self-imposed exile. The Chilean government, outraged by the book's content, ordered some 15,000 copies of it burned. In 1997 García Márquez published News of a Kidnapping, based on his investigation of Colombian drug cartels and their destructive influence on that nation's social fabric. "News of a Kidnapping not only provides a fascinating anatomy of 'one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than 20 years,'" wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, "but also offers the reader new insights into the surreal history of Mr. García Márquez's native country. Indeed, the reader is reminded by this book that the magical realism employed by Mr. García Márquez and other Latin American novelists is in part a narrative strategy for grappling with a social reality so hallucinatory, so irrational that it defies ordinary naturalistic description."

Through the 1980s and 1990s, García Márquez continued to strengthen his reputation as a literary master with publication of the novels Love in the Time of Cholera, based partially on the story of his parents' courtship; The General in His Labyrinth, a fictional account of the final months in the life of nineteenth-century South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar; and Of Love and Other Demons, inspired by the author's recollection of a tomb excavation he had witnessed in 1949, when a centuries-old skeleton of a young girl was discovered with living hair flowing from the skull. García Márquez used this image to create the character of Sierva Maria De Todos Los Angeles, a girl in touch with both the Spanish and the African legacies of her Caribbean heritage. When she is bitten by a mad dog, the area bishop orders an exorcism, but the priest charged with performing the rite falls in love with the girl. As with many of García Márquez's earlier novels, Of Love and Other Demons was hailed for its symbolic commentary on Latin American history. As Times Literary Supplement contributor Michael Kerrigan observed, "To excavate the historic vault in which his people lie buried is, for García Márquez, an act not of desecration but of liberation."

Since the summer of 1999, when he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, García Márquez has lived in relative seclusion, focusing his attention on completing a planned three-volume memoir. He was quoted in a CNN.com report as hailing his diagnosis as an "enormous stroke of luck" that forced him to put aside less urgent projects. The first volume of the memoir will cover the author's family background and his early life. The second will focus on his writing career, and the third will examine his relationships with world leaders.

In March of 2001, García Márquez swore never to set foot in Spain again unless the government withdrew new rules obliging Colombian visitors to obtain visas. According to the Guardian's Giles Tremlett, García Márquez "said that Colombians grew up thinking of Spain as the 'madre patria,' or mother country, even though Colombia won independence from Spain in 1820." In 2002, the first volume of García Márquez's memoir, Vivir Para Contarla (To Live to Tell It) was published. It was later published in the United States under the title Living to Tell the Tale. On November 6, 2003, a tribute in honor of the American publication of his memoir was held at the Town Hall Theater in Manhattan. García Márquez did not attend the event, but he sent a statement. In December of that year, the book was named a New York Times Editor's Choice for 2003. In 2004, García Márquez received even more recognition when talk-show host Oprah Winfrey chose One Hundred Years of Solitude as her January book club selection.

García Márquez continued to stir up controversy in September of 2004 when he was barred from the International Congress of the Spanish Language because he objects to the formal teaching of spelling, a position that angers many of the conference's organizers. On October 18, 2004, his novel Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Sad Whore), was published a week early in Colombia in order to deter people from buying pirated copies. He thwarted bootleggers by changing the last chapter at the last minute, revealing the fact as one million copies of the book shipped to stores throughout Latin America and Spain. With the November 9, 2004, sale of the film rights to his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez is certain to keep his name in the news.

Selected writings

Fiction

La hojarasca (novel; title means "Leaf Storm"), Ediciones Sipa, 1955.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (novella), Aguirre Editor, 1961; translated as No One Writes to the Colonel, Harper & Row, 1968.

La mala hora (novel), Talleres de Graficas (Madrid, Spain), 1961; reprinted, Bruguera (Barcelona, Spain), 1982; English translation by Gregory Rabassa published as In Evil Hour, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (short stories), Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, 1962.

(With Carlos Fuentes) El Gallo de Oro, screenplay from novel by Juan Rulfo, 1964.

Cien años de soledad (novel), Editorial Sudamericana, 1967; translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Harper & Row, 1970.

Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (novella), Editorial Estuario, 1967.

La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y su abuela desalmada (short stories), Barral Editores, 1972.

El negro que hizo esperar a los angeles (short stories), Ediciones Alfil (Montevideo, Uraguay), 1972.

Ojos de perro azul (short stories), Equisditorial, 1972.

Leaf Storm and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1972.

El otoño del patriarca (novel), Plaza & Janes Editores, 1975; translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch, Harper & Row, 1976.

Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez: 1947-1972 (collected short stories), Plaza & Janés Editores, 1975.

Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1978.

Dos novelas de Macondo, Casa de las Americas, 1980.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada (novel), La Oveja Negra, 1981; translated as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Knopf, 1983.

El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve: El verano feliz de la senora Forbes, W. Dampier Editores (Bogota, Colombia), 1982.

El secuestro: Guion cinematografico (unfilmed screenplay), Oveja Negra (Bogota, Colombia), 1982.

Viva Sandino (play), Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1982.

Eréndira (film script), Les Films du Triangle, 1983. Collected Stories, Harper & Row, 1984.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera (novel), Oveja Negra, 1985; translated as Love in the Time of Cholera, Knopf, 1988.

A Time to Die (film script), ICA Cinema, 1988.

Diatribe of Love against a Seated Man (play, first produced at Cervantes Theater, Buenos Aires, 1988), Arango Editores, 1994.

El general en su labertino (novel), Mondadori, 1989; translated as The General in His Labyrinth, Knopf, 1990.

Collected novellas, HarperCollins, 1990.

Doce cuentos peregrinos, Mondadori, 1992; translated as Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, Knopf, 1993.

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: A Tale forChildren, Creative Education, 1993.

Del amor y otros demonios (novel), Mondador, 1994; translated as Of Love and Other Demons, Knopf, 1995.

(Contributor) The Picador Book of Latin American Stories, Picador (New York, NY), 1998.

Individually bound series of single stories, including El verano feliz de la senora Forbes, illustrated by Carmen Sole Vendrell, Groupo Editorial Norma (Bogota, Colombia), 1999.

Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Sad Whore), Knopf, 2004.

Nonfiction

(With Mario Vargas Llosa) La novela en AmericaLatina: Dialogo, Carlos Milla Batres, 1968.

Relato de un naufrago (journalistic pieces), Tusquets Editor, 1970; translated as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Knopf, 1986.

Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (journalistic pieces), Ediciones El Ojo de Camello, 1973.

Operacion Carlota (essays) 1977.

Periodismo militante (journalistic pieces), Son de Maquina (Bogota, Colombia), 1978.

De viaje por los paises socialistas: 90 dias en la "Cortina de hierro" (journalistic pieces), Ediciones Macondo (Colombia), 1978.

Cronicas y reportajes (journalistic pieces), Oveja Negra, 1978.

(Contributor) Los sandanistas, Oveja Negra, 1979.

(Contributor) Asi es Caracas, edited by Soledad Mendoza, Editorial Ateneo de Caracas, 1980.

Obra periodistica (journalistic pieces), edited by Jacques Gilard, Bruguera, Volume 1: Textos constenos, 1981, Volumes 2-3: Entre cachacos, 1982, Volume 4: De Europa y America (1955-1960), 1983.

El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (interviews), Oveja Negra, 1982; translated as The Fragrance of Guava, 1983.

(With Guillermo Nolasco-Juarez) Persecucion y muerte de minorias: dos perspectives, Juarez Editor, 1984.

La aventura de Miguel Littin, clandestino en Chile: Un reportaje, Editorial Sudamericana, 1986; English translation by Asa Zatz published as Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, Holt (New York, NY), 1987.

(Contributor) La Democracia y la paz en AmericaLatina, Editorial El Buho, 1986.

Primeros reportajes, Consorcio de Ediciones Capriles, 1990.

Notas de prensa, 1980-1984, Mondadori (Madrid, Spain), 1991.

(Author of introduction) An Encounter with Fidel: AnInterview, by Gianni Mina, Ocean Press, 1991.

Elogio de la utopia: Una entrevista de Nahuel Maciel, Cronista Ediciones, 1992.

News of a Kidnapping, Knopf, 1997.

For the Sake of a Country Within Reach of the Children, Villegas Editores, 1998.

(Author of introduction) Castro, Fidel, My EarlyYears, LPC Group, 1998.

(With Reynaldo Gonzales) Cubano 100%, Charta, 1998.

Vivir Para Contarla (title means To Live to Tell It ) (memoir), Colombia, 2002; published as Living to Tell the Tale, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

Sources

Books

Bell, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude andSolidarity, St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Bell-Villada, Gene H., García Márquez: The Man andHis Work, University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 82, Gale, 1999.

Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, Gale, 1996.

Dolan, Sean, Gabriel García Márquez, Chelsea House, 1994.

Fiddian, Robin W., García Márquez, Longman, 1995.

Janes, Regina, Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland, University of Missouri Press, 1981.

McGuirk, Bernard and Richard Cardwell, editors, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

McMurray, George R., Gabriel García Márquez, Ungar, 1977.

Wood, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: One HundredYears of Solitude, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Periodicals

New Yorker, February 19-26, 2001.

New York Times, June 19, 1997; March 3, 1999.

New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1968; March 8, 1970; February 20, 1972; October 31, 1976; July 16, 1978; September 16, 1978; November 11, 1979; November 16, 1980; December 5, 1982, p. 7, pp. 60-61; March 27, 1983; April 7, 1985; April 27, 1986; August 9, 1987; April 10, 1988, p. 1, pp. 48-49; September 16, 1990, pp. 1, 30; November 7, 1993, p. 9; May 28, 1995, p. 8; June 15, 1997.

Time, March 16, 1970; November 1, 1976; July 10, 1978; November 1, 1982; March 7, 1983; December 31, 1984; April 14, 1986; May 22, 1995; June 2, 1997, p. 79.

Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1995.

Washington Post, October 14, 2001, p. A28.

World Literature Today, Winter 1982; Winter 1991, p. 85; Autumn 1993, pp. 782-83.

Online

"Gabriel García Márquez," CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news (December 14, 2004).

"Gabriel García Márquez" New York Times,http://www.nytimes.com (December 14, 2004).

"Gabriel García Márquez," Nobelprize.org, http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1982/index.html (December 14, 2004).

"Gabriel García Márquez," Publishers Weekly,http://www.publishersweekly.com (December 14, 2004).

"García Márquez joins protest against new visa rules," Guardian,http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,458994,00.html (December 14, 2004).

"Writer stays true to beleaguered Castro," Guardian,http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,946285,00.html (December 14, 2004).

—Elizabeth Shostak

García Márquez, Gabriel

views updated Jun 08 2018

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Gabriel

Nationality: Colombian. Born: Aracataca, 6 March 1927. Education: Colegio San José, Barranquilla, 1940-42; Colegio Nacional, Zipaquirá, to 1946; studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, 1947-48; University of Cartagena, 1948-49. Family: Married Mercedes Barcha in 1958; two sons. Career: Journalist, 1947-50, 1954, and foreign correspondent in Paris, 1955, El Espectador; journalist, El Heraldo, Barranquilla, 1950-54; founder, Prensa Latina (Cuban press) agency, Bogotá, Havana, 1959, and New York, 1961; lived in Venezuela, Cuba, the United States, Spain, and Mexico; returned to Colombia in 1982; founder, 1979, and since 1979 president, Fundación Habeas. Lives in Mexico. Awards: Colombian Association of Writers and Artists award, 1954; Concurso Nacional de Cuento short story prize, 1955; Esso literary prize, 1961; Chianciano prize (Italy), 1968; Foreign Book prize (France), 1970; Gallegos prize (Venezuela), 1972; Neustadt international prize, 1972; Nobel prize for literature, 1982; Los Angeles Times prize, 1988. LL.D.: Columbia University, New York, 1971. Member: American Academy.

Publications

Short Stories

La hojarasca (novella). 1955; as "Leafstorm," in Leafstorm and Other Stories, 1972.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (novella). 1957; as "No OneWrites to the Colonel," in No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968; with Big Mama's Funeral, 1971.

Los funerales de la mamá grande. 1962; as Big Mama's Funeral, with No One Writes to the Colonel, 1971.

No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, 1968.

No One Writes to the Colonel; Big Mama's Funeral, 1971.

La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada: Siete cuentos. 1972; as Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, 1978.

Ojos de perro azul: Nueve cuentos desconocidos. 1972.

Leafstorm and Other Stories. 1972.

Cuatro cuentos. 1974.

Todo los cuentos 1947-1972. 1975.

Collected Stories. 1984; revised edition, 1991.

Collected Novellas. 1990.

Doce cuentos Peregrinos. 1992; as Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, 1994.

Novels

La mala hora. 1962; as In Evil Hour, 1979.

Isabel viendo llover en Macondo. 1967.

Cien años de soledad. 1967; as One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970.

El negro qui hizo esperar a los ángeles. 1972.

El otoño del patriarca. 1975; as The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976.

El último viaje del buque fantasma. 1976.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada. 1981; as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982.

El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve: el verano feliz de la señora Forbes. 1982.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera. 1985; as Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988.

La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile. 1986; asClandestine in Chile. The Adventures of Miguel Littín, 1987.

El general en su labertino. 1989; as The General in His Labyrinth, 1990.

Plays

Viva Sandino. 1982; as El asalto: el operativo con que el FSLN se lanzó al mundo, 1983.

El secuestro (screenplay). 1982.

María de mi corazón (screenplay) (Mary My Dearest), with J. H. Hermosillo. 1983.

Eréndira (screenplay, from his own novella). 1983.

Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man (produced 1988).

Screenplays:

El secuestro, 1982; María de mi corazón (Mary My Dearest), with J.H. Hermosillo, 1983; Eréndira, from his own novella, 1983.

Other

La novela en América Latina: diálogo, with Mario VargasLlosa. 1968.

Relato de un náufrago. 1970; as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, 1986.

Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (essays). 1973.

Chile, el golpe y los gringos. 1974.

Cuba en Angola. 1977.

Operación Carlota. 1977.

De viaje por los países socialistes: 90 días en la "Cortina de Hierro." 1978.

Crónicas y reportajes (essays). 1978.

Periodismo militante. 1978.

La batalla de Nicaragua, with Gregoria Selser and Daniel WaksmanSchinca. 1979.

García Márquez habla de García Márquez (interviews), edited by Alfonso Rentería Mantilla. 1979.

Los Sandinistas, with others. 1979.

Así es Caracas. 1980.

Obra periodística, edited by Jacques Gilard. (includes vol. 1: Textos consteños; vols. 2-3: Entre cachacos; vol. 4: De Europa y América (1955-1960) 4 vols., 1981-83.

El olor de la guayaba, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (interview).1982; as The Fragrance of Guava, 1983.

La soledad de América Latina; Brindis por la poesía. 1983.

Viva Sandino. 1982; as El asalto, 1983; as El secuestro, 1983.

Persecución y muerte de minorías: Dos perspectivas polemicas, with Guillermo Nolando-Juárez. 1984.

El cataclismo de Dámocles = The Doom of Damocles. 1986.

Textos costeños. 1987.

Diálogo sobre la novela latinoamericana, with Mario Vargas Llosa. 1988.

*

Bibliography:

García Márquez: An Annotated Bibliography 1947-1979 by Margaret Eustella Fau, 1980, and A Bibliographic Guide to García Márquez 1979-1985 by Margaret Eustella Fau and Nelly Sfeir de Gonzáles, 1986; Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1986-1992 by Nelly S. Gonzalez, 1994; Repertorio crítico sobre Gabriel García Márquez by Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, 1995.

Critical Studies:

"The Short Stories of García Márquez" by Roger M. Peel, in Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1), Winter 1971; García Márquez by George R. McMurray, 1977; The Presence of Faulkner in the Writings of García Márquez by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1980; García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland by Regina Janes, 1981; The Evolution of Myth in García Márquez from La hojarasca to Cien años de soledad by Robert Lewis Sims, 1981; García Márquez by Raymond L. Williams, 1984; Special García Márquez Issue, Latin American Literary Review 13, January-June 1985; Critical Perspectives in García Márquez edited by Bradley A. Shaw and Nora Vera-Goodwin, 1986; Critical Essays on García Márquez, 1987; García Márquez and Latin America edited by Alok Bhalla, 1987; García Márquez and the Invention of America by Carlos Fuentes, 1987; García Márquez: New Readings edited by Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, 1987; García Márquez, Writer of Colombia by Stephen Minta, 1987; García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction edited by Julio Ortega, 1988; Understanding García Márquez by Kathleen McNerney, 1989; García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Michael Wood, 1990; García Márquez: The Man and His Work by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 1990; García Márquez: A Study of the Short Fiction by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1991; Home as Creation: The Influence of Early Childhood Experiences in the Literary Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, Agustín Yáñez, and Juan Rolfo by Wilma Else Detjens, 1993; The Influence of Franz Kafka on Three Novels by Gabriel García Márquez by Hannelore Hahn, 1993; Gabriel García Márquez by Sean Dolan, 1994; The Presence of Hemingway in the Short Fiction of Gabriel García Márquez by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1994; Intertextuality in García Márquez by Arnold M. Penuel, 1994; García Márquez and Cuba: A Study of Its Presence in His Fiction, Journalism, and Cinema by Harley D. Oberhelman, 1995.

* * *

Gabriel García Márquez received the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his creativity in the short story, the novel, and journalism. In all of his fiction he is a social critic espousing a leftist ideological position, but he is never doctrinaire in his writing. Universal characteristics are evident in all of his fiction, and he has always contended that the revolutionary role of the writer in the twentieth century is to write well.

If García Márquez had never written a single novel, he would still merit an important niche in literary history for his short fiction, which is often judged to be exemplary. A close reading of his early prose provides an overview of his emerging style and shows the broad vision of the mythical world behind his short stories and novels. The early writings contain the themes and methods that recur throughout his fiction. He starts from the reality of everyday events in Latin American life, events so surreal that he does not have to invent hyperbole. He writes about simple people in the remote reaches of the Caribbean littoral, imbuing them with a literary soul in much the same way William Faulkner dealt with the inhabitants of his mythical Yoknapatawpha County.

The principal theme of many of García Márquez's early short stories is death, and his reading of Kafka, Hemingway, and Woolf is clearly visible. His first short story, "The Third Resignation," appeared in 1947 in the Santafé de Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. It pulsates with the agonizing fear of death and clearly demonstrates his devotion to Kafka. By the mid-1950s García Márquez had established his reputation as a writer of short stories in the national press as well as in his native coastal region, first in Cartagena de Indias and later in Barranquilla. Written as it was during a period of great national chaos subsequent to the 1948 assassination of the liberal political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, this early fiction shows how the common people of Colombia reacted to the violence and censorship of the time. Above all else the works affirm the writer's dedication to aesthetic principles and to the precept of writing well.

Many of García Márquez's best short stories are in the 1962 collection published under the title Los funerales de la mamá grande (Big Mama's Funeral). His first three novels together with the short stories of this volume are the antecedents of his 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). Most of the short stories in the collection concentrate on the vicissitudes of life in the closed environment of a small Colombian town, often called Macondo or sometimes simply el pueblo (the town). This microcosm is clearly based on the village of Aracataca, where García Márquez was born and where he spent the first eight years of his life. The short stories represent a transitional work between the early fiction and his more mature writings, yet the use of recurring characters, family clans, and episodes shows the continuing influence of Faulkner. García Márquez deals with the problems of human dignity and the plight of the poor, as well as with the political violence during the decade after Gaitán's assassination. "One of These Days" is a case in point. It focuses on the unwilling visit of a small-town mayor to a dentist who is his bitter political enemy. Kathleen McNerney has suggested that in this story war and civil repression are both understated or unstated, a technical stratagem García Márquez learned from his study of Hemingway's iceberg theory. Other themes seen in the collection are the problem of class differences ("Montiel's Widow") and the role of the artist in society ("Baltazar's Marvelous Afternoon"). Throughout the volume the struggle of the humble to maintain their personal dignity as they face the power structure above them is constantly in evidence.

"Big Mama's Funeral," the title story of the collection, is a classic example of hyperbolic humor, a technique García Márquez came to use extensively in later works. Many critics believe it to be his most accomplished piece of short fiction, and it has been more widely examined than any of his other short stories. This raucous tale of the death of Big Mama, Macondo's absolute sovereign, including the subsequent consternation it caused in the nation as well as in the ecclesiastical realm, opens the door to a world of florid exaggeration and satiric comedy within the framework of the folktale. It likewise creates a myth of enormous proportions as it lambastes political and social institutions and the Colombian semifeudal system of land tenure. At the same time the author takes giant steps in what David William Foster calls the conceptualization of the fictionalized reader. The story uses the technique called magic realism that requires readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the possibility of a new, extraordinary reality. The technique, so prominent in this story, informs much of García Márquez's subsequent fiction.

In 1972 a collection of seven short stories came out under the unusually long title La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother). As was the case with the collection including "Big Mama's Funeral," the title story contains characters who reappear from earlier stories in the same volume. The collection represents a transition from the earlier fiction of Macondo to central themes seen in García Márquez's later writings: exploitation on both a personal and national scale ("A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" and "Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles"), the extraordinary power of the human imagination ("A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" and "Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship"), and the use of the sea as an enduring metaphor ("The Sea of Lost Time"). In most of the stories a kind of carnivalization takes place, a concept first delineated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin theorizes that the carnivalization technique constitutes or reinforces a radical disequilibrium in life patterns, thereby offering the potential for transformation, after which life may either continue as it was before or be indelibly altered. The potential for change, however, is a welcome hiatus in everyday life, even if the change lasts only for the duration of the festivity.

The title story at the end of the collection has as its central theme the exploitation of Eréndira by her heartless grandmother, but there are suggestions of similar exploitation by the church, by foreign powers, notably Spain and the United States, and by the military establishment. There are frequent references to characters and situations in the first six stories in the collection. The tale is told by an omniscient narrator up to the sixth section, at which point the narrative shifts to the first person and is directed to a fictionalized reader. The story of Eréndira begins when she forgets to extinguish a candelabra and the wind causes it to fall, thereby destroying her grandmother's house and all of her belongings. Eréndira is obliged to repay the entire debt by working as a prostitute under her grandmother's tutelage. This paradigm of exploitation produces a myth with both classical Greek prototypes and modern archetypes.

Twenty years passed before García Márquez published his next volume of short fiction, Strange Pilgrims (Doce cuentos peregrinos). The 12 tales were written during the period from 1974 to 1992. After the appearance in 1975 of the novel El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), García Márquez began to jot down random ideas for a future novel. He soon decided, however, that this would be his fourth collection of short stories. All 12 are set primarily in Europe, and many of the protagonists are Spanish-American expatriates. There are frequent autobiographical references in some of the tales, and at times they are narrated in the first person. The principal cities that serve as settings are Barcelona, Geneva, Rome, and Paris. In an effort to update his recollection of these four cities, García Márquez made a rapid visit to all of them in 1991 to verify his memory before completing the volume for publication. While his earlier fiction focused primarily on the reality of life in the Caribbean, where the supernatural is a part of everyday existence, these short stories reflect a lesser degree of magic realism, due perhaps to the fact that the settings are primarily European. "I Only Came to Use the Phone" ("Solo vine a hablar por teléfono") is a gripping tale of a woman whose car breaks down outside Barcelona. As she searches for a telephone, she comes in contact with a bus driver who offers her a ride. It turns out that all of the occupants are mental patients, and when the bus arrives back at the asylum, she is forced to become a "patient," even though she protests that she is sane. Years later she is still in the asylum and has found the solace she had previously not known in her relationships with her husband and lovers. "The Saint" ("La santa") appeared as a film under the title Milagro en Roma (Miracle in Rome). The tale and the film it inspired describe a dedicated father's journey to Rome with the body of his young daughter in a wooden case. The body has miraculously not decomposed despite the fact that the girl has been dead for 12 years. The short story ends with the father still seeking a way to have her canonized, but the film terminates with the daughter coming to life before the eyes of the joyous father, thereby fulfilling the miracle promised in the film's title.

There is a clear relationship between García Márquez's short fiction and his novels. His concern with solitude and death gradually evolves, as does his interest in the irrational forces that control his protagonists. He seeks a utopian world in which it is possible to celebrate the power of human imagination.

—Harley D. Oberhelman

See the essays on "No One Writes to the Colonel," "Tuesday Siesta," and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."

GarcíA Márquez, Gabriel

views updated May 21 2018

Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez

Born: March 6, 1928
Aracataca, Colombia

Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist

Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose works have earned him the reputation of being one of the greatest living writers in Spain and Latin America.

Education and newspaper jobs

Born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1928, Gabriel García Márquez was the oldest of Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán's twelve children. His father was a telegraph operator. The family was poor, and García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life with his maternal grandparents. They were the most important and influential people in his life, and he loved listening to them tell stories about Colombia's old days.

García Márquez received his early education from the Liceo Nacional of Zipaquirá, Colombia, from which he graduated in 1946. He then entered the University of Bogotá to study law. (He studied for several years but did not enjoy it and never finished.) He wrote his first story in 1947, and it was published in the newspaper El Espectador. Over the next few years he had several more stories published in newspapers. In 1948 civil war broke out in the country and García Márquez moved to Cartagena, Colombia, where he worked as a journalist for the newspaper El Universal. In 1950 he moved to Barranquilla, Colombia, where he wrote for El Heraldo. In 1954 he returned to Bogotá and worked at El Espectador while writing short stories on the side.

Early works

Between 1955 and 1960 several published works had begun to establish García Márquez's fame in the Spanish-speaking world. La hojarasca (1955), a short novel, is set in the made-up town of Macondo in the swampy coastal area of northeastern Colombia known as the Ciénaga. The story reflects the changes the twentieth century brought to the life of this sleepy country town. Much of García Márquez's work centers around funerals. In La hojarasca mourners who knew the dead man in life think about the past, each from his own point of view. Three different peoplean old colonel, his daughter, and her sontell their story. The dead man, a doctor and former friend of the colonel, had committed suicide. The narrators do not entirely explain what happened, but in the course of each story much of the past history of the village of Macondo is revealed. A strong feeling of doom fills the novel.

Macondo and the Buendía family were further developed in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; Nobody Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories ). The next collection of short stories, Los funerales de la Mama Grande (1962), strengthened García Márquez's growing reputation. The publication of Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude ) created a stir when it sold over one hundred thousand copies in fifteen editions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1969.

The story of Cien años de soledad describes the rise and fall of a village as seen in the lives of five generations of one family. It ends with flood and drought, which comes as the last living Buendía figures out the ancient predictions of doom and learns that "races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth." The family is meant to represent Colombia, and through extension, both South America and the rest of the world. Pablo Neruda (19041973), the famous Chilean poet, praised Cien años de soledad, and it is generally considered García Márquez's masterpiece.

Other works

García Márquez considered his next novel, El otono del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch ), "a perfect integration (combination) of journalism and literature." García Márquez continued to write novels, short stories, essays, and film scripts. In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1983 he wrote the film script Erendira, adapted from his 1972 novella (short novel) 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 love and the relationship between aging, death, and decay. After Cholera he published the novels El general en su laber-into (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992; Strange Pilgrims, 1993), and Of Love and Other Demons (1994).

García Márquez's fictional blend of history, politics, real social situations, and fantasy (something made up) has given rise to the term "magical realism." The use of magical realism was often imitated by other Latin American authors, especially Isabel Allende (1942). García Márquez's need to tell a story drives his writing. In the July 1997 issue of Harper's, García Márquez writes, "The best story is not always the first one but rather the one that is told better."

Later years

In 1999 García Márquez returned to journalism with the purchase of Cambio, a weekly newspaper in Colombia. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work trying to improve both the paper's content and its sales. His duties ranged from interviewing heads of state and business leaders to editing copy and photographs. García Márquez told the New York Times that he wanted his paper's young reporters "to tell a story, to go back to the time when a reader could know what happened as if he were there himself."

Later that year García Márquez was diagnosed with cancer and disappeared from public life. Rumors began to circulate that he was dying, aided by a poem appearing on the Internet supposedly written by him as a sort of farewell. In December 2000 García Márquez gave an interview in which he denied writing the poem and said that he had been keeping a low profile because he was busy writing his autobiography (the story of one's own life), which he decided to do after learning that he had cancer. In March 2001 García Márquez announced that he would never set foot in Spain again unless a new European Union rule requiring Colombian citizens to obtain visas (identification documents permitting travel into foreign countries) before entering Spain was withdrawn.

For More Information

Bell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Dolan, Sean. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994.

Gabriel García Márquez

views updated May 23 2018

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez (born 1928) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose works earned him the reputation of being the greatest living writer of Castilian in Spain and Latin America.

Born in Aracata, Magdalena, Gabriel García Márquez received his early education and baccalaureate degree from the Liceo Nacional of Zipaquirá in 1946. That year he 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 Bogotá during repressive eras of the conservative dictators Laureano Gómez and his successor, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.

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 Ciénaga. The story reflects the changes the 20th century wrought 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 Buendía 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 Buendía 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 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 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 Elgeneral en su laber into (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992; Strange Pilgrims, 1993), and Love and Other Demons (1994).

García Márquez's fictional blend of history, politics, social realism, and fantasy has given rise to the term "magical realism." The use of magical realism was often imitated by other Latin American authors, most notably, Isabel Allende. His need to tell the story drives García Márquez's writing. In the July 1997 issue of Harper's, García Márquez writes, "the best story is not always the first one but rather the one that is told better." Because of his storytelling ability, García Márquez has assured himself a place in history as the greatest Latin American writer of the 20th century.

Further Reading

Critical interpretations of Gabriel García Márquez's work can be found in the series Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 8, 1978; Volume 10, 1979; Volume 15, 1980; Volume 27, 1984; Volume 47, 1988; and Volume 55, 1989. Interviews with García Márquez appeared in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, March 1989; Variety, March 25-31, 1996; World Policy Journal, Summer 1996; and Booklist, March 15, 1997. □

García Márquez, Gabriel

views updated Jun 27 2018

García Márquez, Gabriel (1928– ) Colombian novelist. His popular novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) achieves a unique combination of realism, lyricism and mythical fantasy, making it a central text of magic realism. Later works include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), and The General in his Labyrinth (1989). He received the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature.

Márquez, Gabriel García

views updated May 18 2018

Márquez, Gabriel García See García Márquez

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