Washington: When Colonel Aureliano Buendia faced the firing squad, time slipped away, and his life became a dream. Before him rose the mythical town of Macondo and its retinue of gypsies and their pipes and kettle drums and magical inventions.
Of course Buendia’s dream belonged to the teller of the tale, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude casts a spell upon readers that can never be broken.
A Spanish galleon lies in the jungle, its hull “an armour of petrified barnacles and soft moss,” its sails dirty rags, the rigging adorned with orchids. Lovers tryst among butterflies and scorpions, and when it rains, it rains for four years, 11 months and two days.
Garcia Marquez may not have invented magical realism, but he was its most adept practitioner, capable of mixing the transcendent and the bawdy, the whimsical and the tragic in equal proportions.
The 87-year-old Colombian writer died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City, according to Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, president of the official Mexican cultural association.
The cause was not immediately announced, but Garcia Marquez had been in failing health for some time. He was released from the hospital just over a week ago. The longtime journalist was a colourful character who was once punched by fellow Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa and joked that he wrote to make his friends love him.
The author of seven novels and numerous short stories and the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, Garcia Marquez filled his pages with the lives of dreamers, philanderers, anarchists, thieves and prophets, men and women driven by their appetites and often isolated by their folly. As fantastic as his fictions were, they were never far from reality.
In his speech to the Swedish Academy, Garcia Marquez recounted the tragedy of Latin America, “that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend.” He talked about the wars, the military coups, a dictator intent upon “ethnocide” and of all the missing and imprisoned.
He was known to his admirers as “Gabo,” and his influence helped fuel what is known as the “Boom,” the international popularity of Latin American literature in the years after the Second World War.
Novelist Isabel Allende first read One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish in the mid-1960s and found her life, growing up in Peru and Chile, mirrored in its stories. “It was a hurricane of ideas, images and voices,” she said. “It was my family and my grandfather. It was a way of explaining Latin America to the world — and to ourselves.”
Alchemist writer
Edith Grossman, who has been his translator since 1985, described Garcia Marquez as “an alchemist.” “The man writes like an angel,” she said. “He is so deft in his use of language, and he is so profound in his perception of emotions and the psychology of his characters. That combination is extraordinary.”
Even today as the surprise and power of magical realism have waned, Garcia Marquez continues to be influential. “His voice is in the heart and mind of every writer in Latin America, even if you react against him,” said Allende.
The 1967 novel — Cien Anos de Soledad — was published shortly before he turned 40. Until then, he had scraped by as a newspaper reporter, advertising copy writer and screenwriter. He was so poor that he had to mail the manuscript to his Argentine publisher in two packages because he couldn’t afford to send it all at once.
Known for his opinions on Cuba, military dictatorship and Latin American cultural autonomy, Garcia Marquez counted among his friends Bill Clinton, French President Francois Mitterrand and the dictators Omar Torrijos of Panama and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
Friend in deed
Although he faced harsh criticism for his friendship with Castro, who jailed hundreds of dissidents including writers for exercising the same freedom of expression that he gloried in, he was unapologetic. “I have many friends in the world, and they have been reduced to one,” he said, chastising Americans for their “pornographic obsession” with the Cuban leader.
His fiction endeared him to millions of readers. Garcia Marquez wrote the epic One Hundred Years of Solitude in 18 months. He first tried writing the novel when he was 20, but he was 38 when he imagined the famous opening sentence with Buendia facing the firing squad and remembering the time his father took him “to discover ice.”
He was the first child of Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran, the daughter of a retired, well-connected colonel who had fought in Colombia’s War of the Thousand Days. Garcia Marquez met his wife to be, Mercedes Barcha, a teenage daughter of a family of Egyptian origin, whom he married in 1958.
A disciplined writer, he would awaken each morning at 5am and read from a nearby pile of books and made corrections on what he had written the day before. He would shower at 8, using the occasion to dream of characters and write sentences in his mind. After being diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999, he underwent treatment at UCLA Medical Center.
In addition to his wife, Garcia Marquez is survived by sons Rodrigo, a Hollywood film director, and Gonzalo, a painter who lives in Mexico.
In accepting his Nobel Prize, Garcia Marquez quoted William Faulkner’s famous line, “I decline to accept the end of man,” and put the burden on writers to imagine what’s possible, even in the light of the tragedy and despair.... 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 the opposite utopia,” he said.
“A new and sweeping utopia of life...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. ”
— Los Angeles Times, with inputs from agencies
