BIOGRAPHY:

Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian writer, a representative of the “magical realism” movement in literature. His works do not lose their relevance today, and some details of his personal life become a real revelation even for the most sincere fans of his work.

Childhood and youth:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927 in the city of Aracataca, Colombia. Soon after the birth of the child, Marquez’s father received a position as a pharmacist and moved with his wife to Barranquilla (a city in northern Colombia), leaving little “Gabito” in Aracataca to be raised by his grandparents.

In the winter of 1936, the father took Gabriel and his brother to Sinsa, and a few months later the family moved to Sucre, where the father of the future writer opened a pharmacy. However, the upbringing of his grandparents greatly influenced the life and worldview of García Márquez.

His grandfather, Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, whom the boy called “Papalelo”, was a veteran of the Thousand Days’ War and a hero of Colombian liberals. Nicholas, whom Gabriel called his “umbilical cord to history and reality,” was a master storyteller. The grandfather often told his little grandson, “You can’t imagine how much a dead person weighs,” reminding him that there is no greater burden than killing a person. Garcia Marquez later integrated these thoughts into his works.

The boy’s grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguaran Cotes, also played a huge role in the development of the child’s character. Gabriel was inspired by the way she “treated the unusual as something completely natural.” In their house there were often stories of ghosts and omens, which the colonel studiously ignored. Gabriel liked the fact that his grandmother told even the most fantastic or incredible stories as if they were the irrefutable truth. This “deadpan style” appeared later in some of the writer’s famous works.

At school, García Márquez was a timid child who enjoyed writing humorous poetry and drawing comics. A serious, silent child who was not interested in games or sports, his classmates nicknamed him El Viejo (“The Old Man”).

While attending college in San Jose, García Márquez published his first poems in the school magazine. Later, thanks to a government scholarship, Gabriel was sent to study at a Jesuit college in Zipaquirá, a town near Bogotá, where the young man excelled significantly in various sports, becoming captain of the Liceo Nacional Zipaquirá team in three disciplines: football, baseball and running.

After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez became a student at the National University of Colombia – the choice of the Faculty of Law was made to please his father. However, Gabriel continued to dream about writing, wanting to create works similar in style to the stories of his grandfather.

When the university was closed after the Bogotazo armed uprising, Gabriel was transferred to the University of Cartagena, where the young man began working as a reporter for the local newspaper. In 1950, García Márquez decided to focus entirely on journalism, moving back to Barranquilla and becoming a columnist and reporter for the newspaper El Heraldo.

Literature:

Life and new acquaintances in Barranquilla have become a rich source of knowledge in world-class literature. It was here that García Márquez formed a special view of the culture of the Caribbean.

In 1955, García Márquez’s first story, “Fallen Leaves,” about an old colonel, was published; it took the writer 7 years to find a publisher. The Colombian once noted that of everything written since 1973, “Fallen Leaves” was his favorite work, because it was “the most spontaneous and sincere.”

Six years later, the writer’s second story, “Nobody Writes to the Colonel,” about a 75-year-old retired colonel, a veteran of the Thousand Days War, was published. The realistic text of the story was marked by the influence of Ernest Hemingway.

These two stories, as well as some of García Márquez’s later works, contain references to La Violencia, the brutal civil war between Colombia’s Liberal and Conservative parties in the 1950s. The characters in the stories experience various unfair situations, such as curfews, underground newspapers, and press censorship. There are similar references in the first novel, “An Evil Hour” (1962), but the writer decided not to use his work as a platform for political propaganda.

If García Márquez’s first works were written in the genre of “realism”, then later the writer experimented with less traditional directions. Thus, the style of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), which brought Gabriel world fame, was dubbed “magical realism,” and the most striking example of the phenomenon was a fragment about how a beautiful woman hanging laundry on a line is suddenly picked up and carried away by the wind.

In 1972, García Márquez introduced his early work to the public with the publication of The Eyes of a Blue Dog, a collection of early stories written between 1947 and 1955, first published in local newspapers. In short stories, García Márquez, who had not yet fully decided on his style, boldly allowed himself to experiment, but invariably remained a virtuoso of his craft.

In the late 1960s, García Márquez, inspired by the escape of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, began writing the dictatorial novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. Work on the book continued for more than 7 years, until 1975, when the novel was finally published. According to García Márquez, this novel is “a poem about the loneliness of power.” The plot of the book develops through a series of anecdotes about the activities and life of the politician, which do not appear in chronological order.

In 1981, the story “Chronicle of a Near-Death,” innovative in form, was published. The work, written in a pseudo-journalistic style, a few years later formed the basis of a film directed by Francesco Rosi.

On December 8, 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for works that combine the fantastic and the realistic in a rich imaginary world reflecting the conflicts and life of the continent.” The writer’s speech was entitled “The Loneliness of Latin America.” García Márquez became the first Colombian and fourth Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1985, García Márquez published another book that became a bestseller, “Love in the Time of Plague.” The novel explores love in countless forms, “ideal” and “depraved.” The book is based on the tragicomic story of the relationship between the writer’s parents, Louise and Gabriel. The girl’s father, the same grandfather-ladle, did not approve of Louise’s choice – her gentleman was known as a famous womanizer. It took Gabriel Sr. to write hundreds of love poems and letters before Louise’s parents allowed the young couple to get married.

Four years later, the biography of García Márquez was supplemented with the novel “The General in His Labyrinth.” The genre of the work is difficult to classify – critics have differing opinions on this matter. The term “new historical novel” was even proposed – a genre that combines the Latin American boom, post-boom and postmodernism.

Besides literature, García Márquez was involved in the world of cinema. He wrote scripts for more than 25 films and TV series, and 17 films were made based on his works.

In 2000, the La Republica newspaper in Peru published the poem La Marioneta by Mexican ventriloquist Johnny Welsh. For some reason, the authorship of the verse was attributed to García Márquez. Rumors quickly began to spread that the sentimental lines were a farewell letter from a seriously ill writer. For two days the poem was actively recited on radio stations, the text quickly spread on the Internet, but it soon became clear that García Márquez had nothing to do with the publication.

The last work in the Colombian’s career was the story “Remembering My Sad Whores,” published in 2004 in Spanish. The book became the first literary work of the writer after a long break. In 2011, the book was filmed by Danish director Henning Carlsen.

Personal life:

García Márquez met his future wife, Mercedes Barcha, when she was still a schoolgirl. To get married, the young people had to wait until she came of age. The lovers married in 1958 and moved to Caracas. The following year, their first son, Rodrigo Garcia, was born and became a television and film director.

In 1961, the couple traveled throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City. The writer always dreamed of seeing the southern States, because he was impressed by the “southern” novels of William Faulkner.

Three years later, Gabriel had a second son, Gonzalo, who now works as a designer in Mexico City.

Death:

In 1999, the writer was diagnosed with lymphoma. Garcia Marquez underwent chemotherapy at a Los Angeles clinic and went into remission. This event prompted the Colombian to begin writing his memoirs:

“I reduced communication with friends to a minimum, turned off my phone, canceled upcoming trips and all kinds of plans,” he said in an interview with the El Tiempo newspaper.
In 2012, the writer’s brother, Jaime, announced that García Márquez was suffering from dementia. Two years later, in the spring, Gabriel was hospitalized with severe dehydration – he was found to have an infection in his urinary tract and lungs. On April 17, 2014, 87-year-old García Márquez died. The cause of death of the legendary personality was kidney failure and pneumonia.

The writer’s body was cremated during a family ceremony in Mexico City. On April 22, the heads of Colombia and Mexico attended the official ceremony. The funeral cortege with the urn containing the writer’s ashes moved from the house where García Márquez lived for more than 30 years to the Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes). Residents of the writer’s hometown, Aracataca, also held a symbolic funeral.

Quotes:

• “If you meet your true love, then she will not get away from you – not in a week, not in a month, not in a year.”
• “It is a great success in life to find such a person who is pleasant to watch, interesting to listen to, enthusiastically talk, not burdensome to remain silent, laugh sincerely, remember enthusiastically and look forward to the next meeting.”
• “It’s better to arrive at the wrong time than to wait for invitations”
• “Learn to appreciate someone who can’t live without you, and don’t chase after someone who is happy without you!”
• “The worst way to miss someone is to be with them and realize that they will never be yours.”
• “The whole world wants to live in the mountains, not realizing that real happiness lies in how we climb the mountain.”

5 BEST BOOKS BY Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude

In first place in the ranking of the best books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” It is so multifaceted and deep, raising pressing social issues in the countries of Latin America, and throughout the world, that critics and readers awarded the work high marks. The action takes place in the Colombian fictional town of Macondo, focusing on the Buendia family. This is a family in whose life miracles happen every day, and they are in the order of things, no one pays attention to the unusual. The clan of the family name has multifaceted personalities: righteous and sinners, adventurers, heroes, participants in the revolution – the plot intertwines the fates of relatives with different visions of the world throughout the existence of their town from beginning to end. Despite the large number of heroes, each of them is destined by fate to be alone – a kind of “cross” for the Buendia family. The passions are twisted like in a Latin American series, which consists of 20 chapters of the novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude needs to be read meaningfully. Not everyone will be able to grasp the thread of the plot due to the intertwining destinies of many characters. The novel is not directly related to reality, but clearly demonstrates the way of life and history of Latin America.

2. Love in times of Cholera:

The original title of the novel is “Love in the Time of Cholera.” The novel raises such a false question in every person’s life as first love. The beautiful Fermina rejected her childhood friend Fiorentino Ariza, who sincerely loved her, and at the age of 21 she married Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whose dream is to find a cure and protection from the scourge of the Middle Ages – the plague (or cholera, depending on the translation). The scientist’s lifestyle is exclusively rational; Urbino was not distinguished by emotionality and passion, unlike the rejected Aris, whose soul is full of romanticism, unappreciated by the heroine. Fermina did not expect her husband to be unfaithful – he confessed to the affair shortly before his death. After the death of Urbino, the widowed woman at that time again turns her attention to Fiorentino, who throughout the years did not lose hope and waited for the location of his only love. Passion flared up between them, but its quality was different from youthful love – now it was a conscious romance of mature people. The couple goes on a cruise on the ship Arisa, and in order to avoid unnecessary customs checks, they hang a flag on the deck indicating that there are plague (cholera) patients on the ship. Because of him, they will not be allowed home, so Fiorentino and Fermina will go on a new journey.

3. Autumn of the Patriarch:

In the novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Gabriel García Márquez describes in grotesque form the life of a Latin American dictator, a president, the embodied collective image of all the tyrants ruling in Latin America. The reader focuses on one of the dictators of a fictional country named Sacarias, whose mother was a poor poultry farmer. He has been in power for many years, he no longer remembers how he came to rule – he was made president by the British sailors. The author presents him in a phantasmagoric form, combining a ruler, the incarnation of God, at the same time a puppet in the hands of Rock, a threat to the living, while he himself awaits and at the same time fears death. He is a legend, the embodiment of ideal power, while the image is created somewhat comical and not entirely serious. The narrative contains many stories about the life of the ruler; his fate is shaped by gossip and legends, often deliberately contrasted with each other, so that the reader wonders what is fiction and what really happened to the hero.

4. Eyes of a Blue Dog:

One day He and She met. He was impressed by her eyes, which he compared to the eyes of a blue dog. The man stood on the threshold of death, and she began to write “Eyes of a Blue Dog” everywhere so that he would remember her. This woman turned into a cat, and the little black Nabo will do everything to make the angels wait a little. In the process of getting acquainted with the novel, the reader will ask himself many questions, in search of answers to which he will savor the work until the very end. The action takes place in the fantasy city of Macondo, when the rainy season has arrived – that’s when incredible and mysterious events happen there.

5. House of Buendia:

The rating includes a collection of short works by Gabriel García Márquez, written from 1940 to 1980. This time range reveals the growth of the author over 40 years, the diversity of stories from the point of view of different ages; The stories are not similar to each other, the characters and their destinies are different. The collection includes the famous stories “Siesta Tuesday”, as if a chapter was torn out from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “Artificial Roses” and others, a total of 34 diverse stories. Readers will also be interested in getting acquainted with a sketch about a visit to Russia – this is a satirical sketch by Marquez, with a Nobel lecture (remember, the author is a winner of a prestigious prize), with monologues about Borges. The book excites different emotions from joy to deep sadness, and opens up the opportunity to evaluate your own life from other angles.