Gabriel García Márquez

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Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, also known as Gabo (born March 6, 1927^[1] in Aracataca, Colombia) is a Colombian novelist, journalist, editor, publisher, political activist, and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. García Márquez has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe and currently spends much of his time in Mexico City. Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. Many people hold that García Márquez ranks alongside his co-writers of the Latin American Boom, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar as one of the world's greatest 20th-century authors.

Gabriel García Márquez is the father of television and film director Rodrigo Garcia.

[edit] Early days

Gabriel García Márquez was born in the town of Aracataca, Magdalena. His parents left him to be brought up by his grandparents. The writer often credited his grandmother's way of telling a story as an important influence on his own story telling. After starting his early education at a boarding school in Barranquilla, García Márquez at the age of 16 was awarded a scholarship to a secondary school for gifted students called the Liceo Nacional in Zipaquirá which he attended until he was 18. He then moved 30 miles south to Bogotá and studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia.

[edit] Journalism

García Márquez started his career as a reporter and editor for regional newspapers — El Heraldo in Barranquilla and El Universal in Cartagena. It was during this time that he became an active member of the informal group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that provided great motivation and inspiration for his literary career. García Márquez then worked as a foreign correspondent in Caracas, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, India, and New York City.

[edit] Literature

García Márquez's first major work was The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago), which he wrote as a newspaper series in 1955. The book told the true story of a shipwreck by exposing the fact that the existence of contraband aboard a Colombian Navy vessel had contributed to the tragedy due to overweight. This resulted in public controversy, as it discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor. This led to the beginning of his foreign correspondence, as García Márquez became a sort of persona non grata to the government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The series was later published in 1970 and taken by many to have been written as a novel.

Several of his works have been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, notably Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) (1981), which tells the tale of a revenge killing recorded in the newspapers, and Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) (1985), which is loosely based on the story of his parents' courtship. Many of his works, including those two, take place in the "García Márquez universe," in which characters, places, and events reappear from book to book. The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez often cross genres and most integrate at least a few elements of magical realism. Furthermore, many of his novels and short stories integrate actual history as well as complete fabrication, making his genres sometimes difficult to pin down.

His most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970), has sold more than 36 million copies worldwide. It chronicles several generations of the Buendía family who live in a fictional South American village called Macondo. García Márquez won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972 for One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, with his short stories and novels cited as the basis for the award.[1]

In 2002, he published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. The book was a bestseller in the Spanish-speaking world. Edith Grossman's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale, was published in November 2003 and has become another bestseller. On September 10, 2004, the Bogotá daily El Tiempo announced a new novel, Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores), a love story that follows the romance of a 90-year old man and a drugged, pubescent concubine, was published the following October with a first print run of one million copies.

[edit] Political views

García Márquez is noted for his friendship with Cuban president Fidel Castro and has previously expressed sympathy for some Latin American revolutionary groups, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. He has also been critical of the political situation in Colombia.

In different circumstances, García Márquez has occasionally acted as a low profile facilitator in several negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas, including the former 19th of April Movement and the current FARC and ELN organizations. ^{[2] [3]}

On January 26, 2006, García Márquez joined other internationally renowned figures such as Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Sábato, Thiago de Mello, Eduardo Galeano, Carlos Monsiváis, Pablo Armando Fernández, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Pablo Milanés, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Mayra Montero and Ana Lydia Vega, in supporting sovereignty for Puerto Rico and joining the Latin American and Caribbean Congress for the Independence of Puerto Rico, which approved a resolution favoring the island-nation's right to assert its independence, as ratified unanimously by political parties hailing from 22 countries in November 2006; García Márquez's push for the recognition of Puerto Rico's independence was obtained at the behest of the Puerto Rican Independence Party. His pledge for support to the Puerto Rican Independence Movement was part of a wider effort that emerged from the Latin American and Caribbean Congress in Solidarity with Puerto Rico’s Independence.

[edit] Family

The most important relatives of García Márquez were undoubtedly his maternal grandfather and grandmother. His grandfather was Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War. He lived in Aracataca, a banana town by the Caribbean, a village which he helped found. The Colonel was something of a hero to the costeños, for among other things, he refused to stay silent about the banana massacres, delivering a searing denunciation of the murders to Congress in 1929. A very complex and interesting man, the Colonel was also an excellent storyteller who had lead quite an intriguing life -- when he was younger he shot and killed a man in a duel, and it is said that he had fathered over sixteen children. He would speak of his wartime exploits as if they were "almost pleasant experiences -- sort of youthful adventures with guns." The old Colonel taught the young Gabriel lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first one who introduced his grandson to ice -- a miracle to be found at the United Fruit Company store. He also told his young grandson that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later put into the mouths of his characters. His grandmother was Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, and would be no less an influence on the young García Márquez than her husband. She was impressively filled with superstitions and folk beliefs, as were her numerous sisters, and they filled the house with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents -- all of which were studiously ignored by her husband, who once said to young Gabriel, "Don't listen to that. Those are women's beliefs." And yet listen he did, for his grandmother had a 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, her grandson would adopt for his greatest novel.

García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life. His mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, was one of the two children born to the Colonel and his wife. A spirited girl, she unfortunately fell in love with a man named Gabriel Eligio García. "Unfortunately," for García was something of an anathema to her parents. For one thing, he was a Conservative as well as an "hojarasca", a derogatory term applied to the recent residents of the town drawn by the banana trade. (La hojarasca means "dead leaf," as in something that descends in useless flurries and is best swept away.) García also had a reputation as a philanderer, the father of four illegitimate children. He was not exactly the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter -- and yet he did, wooing her with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters -- and even telegraph messages. They tried all they could to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious that their daughter was committed to him. Finally they surrendered to his romantic tenacity, and the Colonel gave her hand in marriage to the former medical student. In order to ease relations, the newlyweds settled in the Colonel's old home town of Riohacha. (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.) García Márquez married Mercedes Barcha in 1958. They have two sons.

[edit] Illness

In 1999, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. This event incited García Márquez to start writing his memoirs. In 2000, his impending death was incorrectly reported by Peruvian daily newspaper La Republica. The next day other newspapers republished his farewell poem, "La Marioneta". Later, in an interview at the same García Márquez, the poem was determined to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist, Johnny Welch.^[4]

[edit] Film

A number of films have been made of García Márquez's work (such as Ruy Guerra's Eréndira), but few have been critical or popular successes. Most recently, British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has completed production in Cartagena, Colombia, of a film based on García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). The film's cast includes Spaniard Javier Bardem and Italian Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as well as Colombian actress Catalina Sandino. Colombian-born U.S. actor John Leguizamo and Benjamin Bratt, of Peruvian descent, also star in the film. The film was released in the U.S. on November 16, 2007.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

• In Evil Hour 1962
• One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
• The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1981
• Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
• The General in His Labyrinth 1989
• Of Love and Other Demons 1994
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores 2004

[edit] Short Stories

• A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (1968)
• The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World (1971)
• Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles (1972)
• The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship (1972)
• Death Constant Beyond Love (1973)
• The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1973)
• The Sea of Lost Time (1974)
• Eyes of a Blue Dog (1978)
• The Night of the Curlews (1978)
• Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses (1978)
• The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock (1978)
• Artificial Roses (1984)
• Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon (1984)
• Big Mama's Funeral (1984)
• Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers (1984)
• Dialogue with the Mirror (1984)
• Eva is Inside Her Cat (1984)
• Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo (1984)
• Montiel's Widow (1984)
• Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wai (1984)
• One Day After Saturday (1984)
• One of These Days (1984)
• The Other Side of Death (1984)
• There Are No Thieves in This Town (1984)
• The Third Resignation (1984)
• Tuesday Siesta (1984)
• Bon Voyage, Mr. President (1992)
• The Saint (1992)
• Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane (1992)
• I Sell My Dreams (1992)
• I Only Came to Use the Phone (1992)
• Maria dos Prazeres(1992)
• Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen (1992)
• Tramontana (1992)
• Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness (1992)
• Light is Like Water (1992)
• The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow (1992)
• The Ghosts of August (1993)
• Caribe Mágico (1996)

[edit] Short Story Collections

• No One Writes to the Colonel 1968
• Leaf Storm 1972
• Innocent Erendira 1978
• Strange Pilgrims 1992

[edit] Non-fiction

• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor 1955
• The Fragrance of Guava 1982
• Clandestine in Chile 1987
• News of a Kidnapping 1996
• A Country for Children 1998
• Living to Tell the Tale 2002

[edit] Further reading

• Bhalla, Alok (1987). Garcia Marquez and Latin America. 
• Bell, Michael (1993). Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity. 
• Bloom, Harold (2007). Gabriel García Márquez (Modern Critical Views). 
• Bloom, Harold (2006). Gabriel García Márquez (Bloom's BioCritiques). 
• Bloom, Harold (2006). One Hundred Years of Solitude (Modern Critical Interpretations). 
• Bloom, Harold (2005). Love in the time of cholera (Modern Critical Interpretations). 
• Darraj, Susan (2006). Gabriel García Márquez(The great Hispanic heritage). 
• Fahy, Thomas (2003). Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the time of cholera : a reader's guide. 
• Fiddian, Robin W. (1995). García Márquez. 
• Fuentes, Carlos (1987). Gabriel García Márquez and the Invention of America. 
• Janes, Regina (1981). Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland. 
• McGuirk, Bernard (1987). Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. 
• McMurray, George R. (1977). Gabriel García Márquez. 
• McMurray, George R. (1987). Critical essays on Gabriel García Márquez. 
• McMurray, George R. (1987). Gabriel García Márquez: Life, Work, and Criticism. 
• McNerney, Kathleen (1989). Understanding Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Mellen, Joan (2000). Gabriel Garcia Márquez. 
• Miller, Yvette E. (1985). Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 
• Oberhelman, Harley D. (1991). Gabriel García Márquez: A Study of the Short Fiction. 
• Ortega, Julio (1988). Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction. 
• Oyarzún, Kemy (1984). Essays on Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Penuel, Arnold M. (1994). Intertextuality in García Márquez. 
• Pelayo, Rubén (2001). Gabriel García Márquez: A Critical Companion. 
• Shaw, Bradley A. (1986). Critical Perspectives on Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Vergara, Isabel (1998). Haunting demons : critical essays on the works of Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Villada, Gene (2002). Gabriel García Márquez's One hundred years of solitude : a casebook. 
• Williams, Raymond L. (1984). Gabriel García Márquez (Twayne's World Authors Series). 

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• The Dictator Novel

[edit] External links

• Ghostwriting Gabo [Memoir Piece by David Unger at Guernica Magazine]
• García Márquez, Gabriel at the Open Directory Project
• Garcia Marquez at The Modern Word
• Oprah makes latest book club pick

• Documentary 52': Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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