Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87. That everything he wrote was gold is how a translator of his works recalls.
Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, Márquez achieved critical acclaim coupled with widespread commercial success. He popularised a literary style labelled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situation. He focused on the physical and moral travail of coastal Colombia.
Márquez was born on March 06, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. Soon after he was born, his father and mother moved to Barranquilla, leaving young Gabito in Aracataca to his maternal grandparents. His father however took him back a few years later. But he never forgot his birthplace Aracataca, to which he returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for his work.
Since his parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life, his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly. His grandfather was a liberal and was considered a hero by Colombian liberals and was highly respected. Márquez described him as his "umbilical cord with history and reality". He occasionally told his young grandson, "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs", reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez later integrated into his novels. This influenced his political views and his literary technique. "… his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States."
Márquez's grandmother played an equally influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural." According to him, she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality". He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, greatly influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
For a long time, Márquez wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents' house where he grew up. He wrote every day for eighteen months and when One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel. This novel was widely popular and led to Márquez's Nobel Prize in 1982.
García Márquez was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature on December 08, 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". His acceptance speech was entitled The Solitude of Latin America. He was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Due to his new-found fame and his outspoken views on U.S. imperialism Garcia Márquez was labelled as a subversive and for many years was denied visas by U.S. immigration authorities. When Bill Clinton was elected U.S. president he lifted the travel ban and cited One Hundred Years of Solitude as his favourite novel.
His two masterpieces, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, present his central themes of violence, solitude, and the overwhelming human need for love. García Márquez's style marks a high point in Latin American magic realism; it is rich and lucid, mixing reality and fantasy. Among his other works are Leaf Storm and Other Stories, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Of Love and Other Demons, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores.
He is one of those very rare artists who succeeded in chronicling not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also those of an entire continent. He was a master storyteller who forces upon us at every page the wonder and extravagance of life. Indeed, what seemed implausible to him is a lifetime of absolute normalcy, a world in which there are no invasions, occupations, or wars, no poverty or dictators, no earthquakes or cholera. Márquez galvanised Colombian literature in an unprecedented way. He indeed played a leading role in rejuvenating, reformulating and re-contextualizing literature in Colombia and the rest of Latin America.
Although Márquez portrayed the corrupt nature and the injustices, he refused to use his work as a platform for political propaganda. According to him, the duty of the revolutionary writer is to write well, and the ideal novel is one that moves its reader by its political and social content, and, at the same time, by its power to penetrate reality and expose its other side. He is one of those very rare artists who succeeded in chronicling not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also those of an entire continent. His works impressed many international figures including Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, who became his friends.
The world is in pains at the death of such a stalwart. In paying his tributes to the immortal writer, US President Barack Obama said, the world had lost "one of its greatest visionary writers", adding that he cherished an inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, presented to him by the author on a visit to Mexico. "I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo's work will live on for generations to come."
Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said, "A thousand years of solitude and sadness at the death of the greatest Colombian of all time. Solidarity and condolences to his wife and family ... Such giants never die."
President of Mexico, the novelist's adopted home, Enrique Peña Nieto expressed sadness at the death of Marquez and termed him as "one of the greatest writers of our time." Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda was quoted as saying that he was "the most important writer in Spanish of the 20th century", central to the Latin American literary boom that "revolutionised everything: the imagination, the way of telling a story, and the literary universe". Colombian singer Shakira wrote: "We will remember your life, dear Gabo, like a unique and unrepeatable gift, and the most original of stories."
Garcia Marquez is no more. But he will be remembered as the most important writer in Spanish of the 20th century, as a master story-teller, creator of the Colonel and the Patriarch, for his magic realism and, above all, for Macondo, his imaginary village.
Indeed, such giants don't die.
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